Michael Frayn 
A Landing on the Sun 

Ever since an obscure Civil Servant called Stephen Summerchild fell to his death from a window in the Admiralty, rumours have circulated about a connection with some secret defence project. Now, as a television company reinvestigates the case, the Cabinet Office feels it may be prudent to make a reassessment of its own, in case of any sudden alarm at Number Ten.'A Landing on the Sun is not just a masterly novel in its own right, but a clever debunking of those off-the-peg Whitehall yarns … Many novelists have tried to take the lid off the arcane world of the Civil Service. Frayn has done it as brilliantly and imaginitively as any of them.' Daily Telegraph'Comedy creeps up on A Landing on the Sun like bindweed, transforming what starts out as a thriller into a small masterpiece of the absurd.' Financial Times