books in order

Michael Frayn Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Tin Men (1965)
  2. The Russian Interpreter (1966)
  3. Towards the End of the Morning (1967)
  4. A Very Private Life (1968)
  5. Sweet Dreams (1973)
  6. The Trick of It (1989)
  7. A Landing On the Sun (1991)
  8. Headlong (1998)
  9. Spies (2002)
  10. Skios (2012)

Collections

  1. The Two of Us (1970)
  2. Listen To This (1990)

Plays

  1. Alphabetical Order (1977)
  2. Clouds (1977)
  3. Donkeys’ Years (1977)
  4. Make and Break (1980)
  5. Noises Off (1982)
  6. Benefactors (1984)
  7. Clockwise (1986)
  8. Balmoral (1988)
  9. First and Last (1989)
  10. Look Look (1990)
  11. Audience (1991)
  12. Now You Know (1992)
  13. Copenhagen (1998)
  14. Frayn Plays: 1 (1998)
  15. Democracy (2003)
  16. Crimson Hotel / Audience (2007)
  17. Afterlife (2008)
  18. Frayn Plays (2010)
  19. Matchbox Theatre (2014)
  20. Alarms and Excursions (2015)
  21. Frayn Plays: 4 (2017)
  22. Frayn Plays: 3 (2017)
  23. The Sneeze (2017)
  24. Frayn Plays: 2 (2017)
  25. Pocket Playhouse (2017)
  26. Magic Mobile (2020)

Novellas

  1. Celia’s Secret (2000)

Non fiction

  1. The Day of the Dog (1962)
  2. The Book of Fub (1963)
  3. At Bay in Gear Street (1967)
  4. Constructions (1974)
  5. Speak After the Beep (1995)
  6. The Additional Michael Frayn (2000)
  7. The Human Touch (2006)
  8. Collected Columns (2007)
  9. Stage Directions (2008)
  10. Travels with a Typewriter (2009)
  11. My Father’s Fortune (2010)

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Michael Frayn Books Overview

Towards the End of the Morning

Frayn’s 1967 novel about Fleet Street portrays a newspaper world long since gone. Stuck in a sleepy newspaper department, covering nature notes and crosswords, Dyson dreams of liberation and recognition. When a chance occurs to appear on TV, he eagerly prepares to greet the celebrity life.

The Trick of It

He knows everything about her before they meet: the make of pen she writes with, her exact height, the various honorary degrees she holds. He knows more about her nine novels and 27 short stories than she does herself. Naturally he has devoted his life to studying and teaching them, and he reveres them. Also, he is four times as clever as she is. The Trick of It is a comic and painful voyage of exploration into the creative process and the feelings it arouses in others. The humble academic disciple finds himself admitted to his subject’s life, and off to this oldest friend go a series of dispatches by turns awed and patronizing, reverential and jealous, disingenuous and appallingly frank.

A Landing On the Sun

From the bestselling author of Headlong and Spies, ‘an unconditional triumph’ The Washington Post Book WorldFor fifteen years, ever since the taciturn civil servant Summerchild fell to his death from a window in the Admiralty, there have been rumors. So Brian Jessel, a young member of the Cabinet Office, is diverted from his routine work and asked to prepare an internal report. Slowly, from the archives in the Cabinet Office Registry, Jessel begins to reconstruct Summerchild’s last months. It begins to emerge that, at a time when America had just put men on the moon, the British were involved in an even bolder project, and that Summerchild was investigating a phenomenon as common as sunlight, but as powerful and dangerous as any of the forces that modern science has known. The secret world into which Brian Jessel stumbles turns out to be even more extraordinary than his department had feared.

Headlong

An unlikely con man wagers wife, wealth, and sanity in pursuit of an elusive Old Master. Invited to dinner by the boorish local landowner, Martin Clay, an easily distracted philosopher, and his art historian wife are asked to as*sess three dusty paintings blocking the draught from the chimney. But hiding beneath the soot is nothing less Martin believes than a lost work by Bruegel. So begins a hilarious trail of lies and concealments, desperate schemes and soaring hopes as Martin, betting all that he owns and much that he doesn’t, embarks on a quest to prove his hunch, win his wife over, and separate the painting from its owner. In Headlong, Michael Frayn, ‘the master of what is seriously funny’ Anthony Burgess, offers a procession of superbly realized characters, from the country squire gone to seed to his giddy, oversexed young wife. All are burdened by human muddle and human cravings; all are searching for a moral compass as they grapple with greed, folly, and desire. And at the heart of the clamor is Breugel’s vision, its dark tones warning of the real risks of temptation and obsession. With this new novel, Michael Frayn has given us entertainment of the highest order. Supremely wise and wickedly funny, Headlong elevates Frayn into the front rank of contemporary novelists.

Spies

From the bestselling author of Headlong, a mesmerizing novel about secrecy, imagination, and a child’s game turned deadly earnestThe sudden trace of a disturbing, forgotten aroma compels Stephen Wheatley to return to the site of a dimly remembered but troubling childhood summer in wartime London. As he pieces together his scattered images, we are brought back to a quiet, suburan street where two boys, Keith and his sidekick Stephen are engaged in their own version of the war effort: spying on the neighbors, recording their movements, ferreting out their secrets. But when Keith utters six shocking words, the boys’ game of espionage takes a sinister and unintended turn. A wife’s simple errands and a family’s ordinary rituals once the focus of childish speculation become the tragic elements of adult catastrophe. In gripping prose, charged with emotional intensity, Spies reaches into the moral confusion of youth to reveal a reality filled with deceptions and betrayals, where the bonds of friendship, marriage, and family are unravelled by cowardice and erotic desire. Master illusionist Michael Frayn powerfully demonstrates, yet again, that what appears to be happening in front of our eyes often turns out to be something we can’t see at all.

The Two of Us

He knows everything about her before they meet: the make of pen she writes with, her exact height, the various honorary degrees she holds. He knows more about her nine novels and 27 short stories than she does herself. Naturally he has devoted his life to studying and teaching them, and he reveres them. Also, he is four times as clever as she is. The Trick of It is a comic and painful voyage of exploration into the creative process and the feelings it arouses in others. The humble academic disciple finds himself admitted to his subject’s life, and off to this oldest friend go a series of dispatches by turns awed and patronizing, reverential and jealous, disingenuous and appallingly frank.

Listen To This

A collection of short sketches which first appeared in ‘The Guardian’ and ‘The Observer’. The author has written novels such as ‘A Very Private Life’, ‘Towards the End of Morning’ and ‘The Trick of It’, and a number of plays including ‘Make and Break’, ‘Noises Off’ and ‘The Two of Us’.

Donkeys’ Years

Twenty years after graduation, six former students return to their college for a reunion dinner in this late 1970s riotous farce which takes on the ridiculousness of English propriety. Seeing the reunion as a chance to escape the tedium of family and working life, the group seizes the opportunity for drunken buffoonery and to reminisce about and relive their jaunty college days in stuffy, middle class, white, male Oxbridge college. In classic bedroom farce form, the group gets locked into the college overnight with the much desired head master’s wife and a cabinet minister. They and their high profile guests are flung into one embarrassing situation after another as they chase in and out of multiple bedroom doors, some in their underwear, with misunderstandings and mistaken identities all the staples of classic farce. Frayn’s extraordinary repartee raises the genre to new heights of wit and subtly as the group comedically ponders their varying degrees of success and the role of predestination and free will in their life choices.

Noises Off

Noises Off is not one play but two simultaneously a traditional sex farce, Nothing On, and the backstage farce that develops during Nothing On’s final rehearsal and tour. The two farces begin to interlock, as the characters make their exits from Nothing On only to find themselves making entrances into the even worse nightmare going on backstage, and exit from that only to make their entrances back into Nothing On. In the end, at the disastrous final performance in Stockton on Tees, the two farces can be kept separate no longer, and coalesce into one single collective nervous breakdown. Noises Off won both the Evening Standard and the Olivier Awards for Best Comedy when it was first produced, and ran in the West End for nearly five years. Michael Frayn’s most recent play, Copenhagen, won both the Evening Standard Best Play Award in London and the Tony Best Play Award in New York.

Now You Know

Now You Know: ‘Frayn’s light but serious, marvellous play, about official and unofficial secrets, about idle curiosity and investigative purpose’ Observer

Copenhagen

‘Michael Frayn’s tremendous play is a piece of history, an intellectual thriller, a psychological investigation and a moral tribunal in full session’ Sunday Times ‘A profound and haunting meditation on the mysteries of human motivation’ Independent ‘Frayn has seized on a ral life historical and scientific mystery. In 1941 the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who formulated the famous Uncertainty Principle about the movement of particles, and was at that time leading the Na*zi’s nuclear programme, went to visit his old boss and mentor, Niels Bohr, in Copenhagen. What was the purpose of his visit to Na*zi occupied Denmark? What did the two old friends say to each other, particularly bearing in mind that Bohr was both half Jewish and a Danish patriot?…
Frayn argues that just as it is impossible to be certain of the precise location of an electron, so it is impossible to be certain about the workings of the human mind…
What is certain is that Frayn makes ideas zing and sing in this play’ Daily Telegraph

Frayn Plays: 1

Four old friends sit down for a quiet evening together. But they are harassed by various bells, warblers, beepers and cheepers, all trying to warn them of something.

Democracy

A brilliant exploration of character and conscience from the author of COPENHAGEN, set amid the tensions of 1960s BerlinIn Democracy, Michael Frayn once again creates out of the known events of twentieth century history a drama of extraordinary urgency and subtlety, reimagining the interactions and motivations of Willy Brandt as he became chancellor of West Germany in 1966 and those of his political circle, including G nter Guillaume, a functionary who became Brandt’s personal assistant and who was eventually exposed as an East German spy in a discovery that helped force Brandt from office. But what circumstances allowed Brandt to become the first left wing chancellor in forty years? And why, given his progressive policies, did the East German secret police feel it necessary to plant a spy in his office and risk bringing down his government? Michael Frayn writes in his postscript to the play, ‘Complexity is what the play is about: the complexity of human arrangements and of human beings themselves, and the difficulties that this creates in both shaping and understanding our actions.’

Crimson Hotel / Audience

In this absurdist comedy two lovers a playwright and his leadactress escape to a discreet and charming Parisian hotel, conjuredfrom a desert landscape. As the walls, door and crimson curtains ofRoom 322 materialise around them, a fumbling of fastenings ensues. Butthey soon discover they’re not the only couple intent on escaping fromreality…
The Crimson Hotel has its world premiere at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre, London, on 25 July 2007. The volume also features the one act play, Audience, a delightful send up which holds up a mirror to the outlandish behaviour and comedy inherent in every theatre audience.

Frayn Plays

Michael Frayn is one of the great playwrights of our time, enjoying international acclaim and prestige. This anthology contains three of his strongest titles of serious drama: Copenhagen, Democracy and Afterlife. The volume features the definitive version of each play together with an introduction by the author and a chronology of his work.

Frayn Plays: 3

Michael Frayn is ‘one of the theatre’s subtlest, most sophisticated minds.’ The Times Here: ‘About time, space, and life…
A touching, brilliant construction. It’s both deeply thought and deeply felt.’ Sunday Times Now You Know: ‘Frayn’s light but serious, marvelous new play, about official and unofficial secrets, about idle curiosity and investigative purpose.’ Observer La Belle Vivette: ‘Frayn’s elegant libretto…
Frayn has made an Offenbach opera a farce to be reckoned with…
a razor sharp reworking.’ Mail on Sunday

The Sneeze

Comprising four one act comic vaudevilles and four short stories adapted for the stage by Michael Frayn, The Sneeze introduces readers to a less familiar selection of work by one of the greatest precursors of modern drama. First published in 1989, this reissue includes The Sneeze; The Alien Corn; The Bear; The Evils of Tobacco; The Inspector General; Swan Song; The Prospect, and Plots. Michael Frayn’s translations of Chekhov’s work marry the expertise of the translator with the innate understanding of a master dramatist and are widely regarded as the truest, most authentic renderings of Chekhov’s work: ‘His keen imaginative sympathy with the great Russian dramatist extends beyond translation…
But translation is an art at which he excels.’ Spectator

Frayn Plays: 2

‘A sophisticated drollery, an educated amuseme*nt.’–New Statesman

Constructions

First published in 1974 and republished following the success of Frayn’s masterly work of philosophy, ‘The Human Touch’, ‘Constructions‘ is a dazzling, thought provoking and fascinating book which explores some of the great problems in philosophy and of everyday life.

The Additional Michael Frayn

This companion to the highly successful Original Michael Frayn incorporates the Speak After the Beep collection, origionally published to huge acclaim and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

The Human Touch

What do we really know? What are we in relation to the world around us? Here, the acclaimed playwright and novelist takes on the great questions of his career and of our lives
Humankind, scientists agree, is an insignificant speck in the impersonal vastness of the universe. But what would that universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would there be numbers if there were no one to count them? Would the universe even be vast, without the fact of our smallness to give it scale?
With wit, charm, and brilliance, this epic work of philosophy sets out to make sense of our place in the scheme of things. Our contact with the world around us, Michael Frayn shows, is always fleeting and indeterminate, yet we have nevertheless had to fashion a comprehensible universe in which action is possible. But how do we distinguish our subjective experience from what is objectively true and knowable? Surveying the spectrum of philosophical concerns from the existence of space and time to relativity and language, Frayn attempts to resolve what he calls the oldest mystery : the world is what we make of it. In which case, though, what are we? All of Frayn’s novels and plays have grappled with these essential questions; in this book he confronts them head on.

Collected Columns

Playwright and novelist Michael Frayn originally came to prominence as the writer of short, surreal, razor sharp explorations of human foibles, sex, politics, manners, and the events of the day. Here are 110 of his finest and funniest pieces, selected and introduced by himself. Michael Frayn is the author of plays including Copenhagen, novels including Headlong, and the recent philosophy work The Human Touch.

Travels with a Typewriter

‘All writers of fiction should be required by law to go out and do a bit of reporting from time to time, just to remind them how different the real world in front of their eyes is from the invented world behind them’. This is what Frayn did in mid career, when he took up his old trade, journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the ‘Observer’ about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe ‘not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday’ and his accounts became the starting point for some of the novels and plays he wrote later. From a kibbutz in Israel to summer rains in Japan, bicycles in Cambridge to Notting Hill at the end of the 1950s, they are glimpses of a world which sometimes seems tantalisingly familar, sometimes vanished forever.

My Father’s Fortune

For the first time, Michael Frayn, the ‘master of what is seriously funny,’ turns his humor and narrative genius on his own family’s story, to re create the world that made him who he is Whether he is deliriously funny or philosophically profound, as a novelist and a playwright Michael Frayn has concerned himself with the ordinary life lived by erring humans, which is always more extraordinary than people think. In My Father’s Fortune, Frayn reveals the original exemplar of the extraordinary ordinary life: his father, Tom Frayn.A clever lad, a roofing salesman with a winning smile and a racetrack vocabulary, Tom Frayn emerged undaunted from a childhood spent in two rooms with six other people, all of them deaf. And undaunted he stayed, through German rockets, feckless in laws, and his own increasing deafness; through the setback of a son as bafflingly slow witted as the father was quick on his feet; through the shockingly sudden tragedy that darkened his life. Tom Frayn left his son little more than three watches and two ink and wash prints. But the true fortune he passed on was the great humor and spirit revealed in this beguiling memoir. Anthony Burgess

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