All you need to know about Frayn's Spies is in this advanced guide to the text. Connell Guides are advanced guide books that offer sophisticated analysis and broad critical perspectives for higher-level GCSE and A Level English Literature students. Written by leading academics, Connell Guides are clear, concise and beautifully designed to help students understand, and enjoy, great works of literature. Connell Guides are also great reads themselves scholarly, yet approachable and entertaining.
Spies, wrote Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, has “a classic English theme: the bittersweet adventure from childhood, recollected in old age, in which the mysterious doings of the grown-ups were trespassed on and misinterpreted”. Books as diverse as Great Expectations, The Go-Between and Atonement fall into this category. Spies, first published in 2002, is a worthy addition to the list and shares many of the same preoccupations as these novels; it is interested in memory, identity, loss of innocence and perception. It is, in other words, a book about how we make sense of the world.
