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.

Shortlisted
The Booker Prize 1999
Published by
Faber & Faber
Publication date

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Michael Frayn

Michael Frayn

About the Author

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

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Spies