A Landing on the Sun: A Novel - Softcover

Frayn, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312421907 ISBN 13: 9780312421908

Publisher: Picador, 2003

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Headlong and Spies, "an unconditional triumph" (The Washington Post Book World)

For 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.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Frayn is the author of eleven novels, including the bestselling Headlong and Spies. He has also written thirteen plays, among them Noises Off and Copenhagen, which won three Tony Awards in l999. He lives in London.

From Kirkus Reviews

Frayn, noted for his waggish plays (Noises Off, Benefactors) as well as his novel, The Trick of It (1990), turns a British civil servant's investigation into an unexplained 15-year-old death into a winsome, whimsical comedy. Middle-aged nonentity Brian Jessel is assigned to look discreetly--and forestall the tabloid journalists' recurring interest- -into the 1974 death of equally minor government minion Stephen Summerchild, who evidently fell from an Admiralty window onto M06D property, becoming an everlasting mystery. Did Summerchild fall accidentally, jump, or get pushed? And why should his blameless life have ended so irregularly--contact, perhaps, with foreign powers? Tracking down and sifting through the reports Summerchild dutifully filed during the last months of his life, Jessel follows his footsteps as his assignment--a study of contemporary ``quality of life''--takes him to Elizabeth Serafin (an austere Oxford philosophy don who demonstrates to him Socratically that happiness is necessarily a subjective concept) and through the belly of dialectic to an unlikely and desperate love affair with Dr. Serafin, documented with amusing and maddening ellipses on a series of typed transcripts and audiotapes. All the while, Jessel, whose small son barely moors him in his present life, finds himself dissolving into Summerchild, wondering why Millie Summerchild, whom Jessel had known for years from an amateur orchestra, had dropped out of sight a week before her father's death, and what Dr. Serafin's three sons are up to that's driven their mother to such grief. Whimsically charming to the end, but grave and sweetly sad as well--altogether a very British affair. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0312421907
• ISBN 13: 9780312421908
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272