Name: Spies
ISBN: 9780312421175

Michael Frayn

When a long-forgotten scent forces Stephen Wheatley to confront his past, he starts to remember a troubling childhood summer in wartime London where an imaginative child's game of playing spies wreaked havoc upon innocent lives.

A Novel

Spies

"In the peaceful Close, the only visible signs of war are the nightly blackout and a single random bombsite. To the boys, though, the whole district is riddled with secret passages, underground laboratories, and hideaways for secret agents that must be monitored. And then, with six shocking words, Keith reveals that the Germans have infiltrated his family; from that point, the espionage game takes a sinister and unintended turn. A wife's simple errands and a family's ordinary rituals, the unremarkable geography of post office and railway tracks, are no longer the objects of childish speculation but the tragic elements of adult catastrophe."--BOOK JACKET.

Rohan Uddin

An elegantly written novel about secrets and boyhood imaginations, and set in a Britain at war, this novel is a great indication of Michael Frayn's brilliance. It is taut, and the writing evokes the childish fascination with mysteries and obsessions with dark adult desires. Interesting to note that it is part of the O Level English Literature syllabus.

Spies A Novel

Reviews