Celia's secret : an investigation / Michael Frayn and David Burke

Frayn, Michael; Burke, David

ISBN 10: 0571205305 / ISBN 13: 9780571205301

Published by London : Faber, 2000

About this Item

Near fine cloth copy in a near-fine, very slightly edge-nicked and dust-dulled dust-wrapper, now mylar-sleeved. Remains particularly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and strong. SIGNED by both authors. Physical description: viii, 110 pages ; 20 cm. Subjects: Heisenberg, Werner 1901-1976; Bohr, Niels 1885-1962; Nuclear weapons Germany History; World War, 1939-1945 Germany; Impostors and imposture; Germany. 1 Kg. Seller Inventory # 400806

Bibliographic Details

Title: Celia's secret : an investigation / Michael ...

Publisher: London : Faber

Publication Date: 2000

Binding: Hardcover

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

One day during the run of Michael Fryan's play Copenhagen, a curious letter arrived from a housewife in Chiswick. She enclosed a few faded pages of barely legible German which she thought might have some relevance to the mystery at the play's heart. They turned out to mark the start of a long and winding trail. The subject of Copenhagen is the strange visit that the German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, made to his former Danish colleague, Niels Bohr in 1941. The two old friends now found themselves on opposite sides in a world war, and Heisenberg could not explain to Bohr that he was running the Nazis' secret atomic programme. His intentions have intrigued and baffled historians, and the hitherto unpublished German documents which Celia Rhys-Evans now began to send Michael Frayn cast a remarkable new light on certain aspects of the story. The gradual emergence of these papers was followed with particularly close interest by the actor, David Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, and who had happened to have a wide experience of documents of this sort. When it was all over David Burke and Michael Frayn sat down together, rather as Bohr and Heisenberg do in the play, to try to unravel the mystery, and, like Bohr and Heisenberg, to confront once again the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.

About the Author:

Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His novels include Towards the End of the Morning, The Trick of It and A Landing on the Sun. Headlong (1999) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while his most recent novel, Spies (2002), won the Whitbread Novel Award. His fifteen plays range from Noises Off to Copenhagen and most recently Afterlife. He is married to the writer Claire Tomalin.