A (suit)case of mistaken identity leads to a series of absurd misadventures, as Michael Frayn exports a madcap farce to an unsuspecting Greek island
Headlong
Written by Michael Frayn
- Shortlisted
- The Booker Prize 1999
- Published by Faber & Faber
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Michael Frayn’s ingeniously comic art thriller about a young philosophy lecturer’s obsessive hunt for a missing masterpiece
A novel of historical investigation and comic invention, Headlong pitches from gallery to museum to library delivering an extended lesson in iconography and aesthetics. It uses the elusive story behind a painting, which is presumed - by Martin Clay, an easily-distracted philosophy lecturer - to be a lost work of Brueghel. He risks everything he has in his efforts to establish its provenance and then spirit it from its owner.
Michael Frayn
Michael Frayn was born in London and began his writing career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer
More about Michael Frayn Other nominated books by Michael Frayn
Michael Frayn’s evocative wartime psychological drama, which revisits the confused innocence of childhood through the memories of old age
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