Publisher Description

One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, winner of the Tony Award for best play in 1999, Frayn was presented with a curious package from a London housewife that contained a few faded pages of barely legible German. These pages, apparently found concealed beneath some floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of the play. While Frayn began to lose all sense of certainty, actor David Burke, who played Niels Bohr in the London production and had some experience with documents of this sort, followed the action with particularly close interest. After the riddle was cracked and the fog had cleared, Frayn and Burke sat down together to ponder the winding trail of the Copenhagen papers. By turns comic and profound, The Copenhagen Papers explores the conundrum at the heart of all Michael Frayn's work--human fallibility and the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

Author Biography

Michael Frayn is the author of the award-winning Copenhagen and twelve other plays, including Noises Off. The most recent of his ten novels is Spies. David Burke is an actor who has worked extensively with Britain's National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Review

"A deliciously intricate, whimsically philosophical little intrigue. . .The greatest fun of The Copenhagen Papers is the companionship of Mr. Frayn and Mr. Burke, who take turns writing chapters and display plenty of wry British charm." --The New York Times "Comic and intriguing. . .[an] ingenious book about human gullibility and the incomprehensibility of one's own behavior." --Library Journal "An entertaining. . .game of historical cat-and-mouse. . . another good yarn from Frayn." --Kirkus Reviews

Review Quote

Comic and intriguing. . .[an] ingenious book about human gullibility and the incomprehensibility of one's own behavior.

Details