Julian and Annie have only just announced their forthcoming marriage, when Annie's twelve-year old son Dan mysteriously fails to come home from school. Despite an extensive police investigation, the days turn into weeks and it is as if he has vanished into thin air. Over the next three years, Annie refuses to give up hope that somewhere her son is alive and will one day return home. Julian, meanwhile, can't help but yearn for Annie to put the past behind her and move on.

Then, out of the blue, a call from Glasgow brings shocking news of Dan's fate. And far from being over, it seems the mystery of his disappearance is only just beginning...

Based on a true story, Deceptions is a powerfully compelling and affecting novel about the ways we deceive the ones we love and the ways we deceive ourselves... The continuous coverage on Madeleine McCann and other cases of missing children in the press makes elements of this story strangely familiar. Frayn also addresses the issue of what makes on missing child news worthy and another less so. Above this, the book deals with deeper psychological issues. It will appeal to fans of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal with a similarly unreliable narrator who will leave readers in doubt as to his motives.

Chiswick resident Rebecca Frayn is a film maker, screen writer and novelist. Over the years she has directed a wide range of signature documentaries for Cutting Edge, Modern Times, The South Bank Show and Imagine, and an original three-part series Space for the BBC.

More recently she has directed drama projects and made a number of films about prominent women of our times, including Aung San Suu Kyi, Leni Riefenstahl, Annie Leibovitz and Nora Ephron, while her screenplay for the BBC's Screen On One, Killing Me Softly was about Sara Thornton, whose controversial conviction for the murder of her alcoholic husband helped bring about a reform of the law on domestic violence.

Her first novel, One Life, a Daily Mail Book Club choice, dealt with the complex emotional and ethical landscape of IVF.

In 2008, after making a campaigning film against the proposed expansion of Heathrow, she co-founded We CAN, a group who lobby the government to take action on climate change, both through the media and by direct action, www.wecan.uk.com. Her most recent projects are a screenplay about Aung San Suu Kyi. She is now working on a third novel.

Rebecca appeared at the first Chiswick Book Festival, alongside her father, Michael Frayn.

June 27, 2010