Priscilla's Spies
A delightful Irish coastal adventure of misbegotten espionage, slippery mudbanks, and an irrepressible fifteen-year-old girl.

A perfectly polished English schoolboy. An irrepressible Irish tomboy. And a hilarious hunt for a nonexistent spy.Seventeen-year-old Frank Mannix is a public school legend. Triumphant on the cricket pitch and setting the sartorial standard in his glorious crimson-sashed flannels, he expects his summer holiday in the remote west of Ireland to be an exercise in dignified salmon fishing and grouse shooting. Instead, a violently twisted ankle strands him in the company of his fifteen-year-old cousin, Priscilla—a hurricane of a girl who possesses her own sailing boat, a delightfully reckless vocabulary, and a deeply ingrained suspicion of tourists.When Priscilla spots a clumsy vacationer pitching a tent on the rugged coastal islands, her imagination immediately brands him a dangerous German spy. Kidnapping the injured Frank in a dilapidated bath-chair, she forces him into her sailing dinghy, the Tortoise, for a frantic nautical pursuit across Rosnacree Bay.Priscilla's Spies is a masterclass in classic comedic storytelling. From the battle of wits against an eccentric aunt's medical philosophies to the delightfully disastrous attempts to navigate the treacherous tides of the Irish coast, James Harvey paints a vivid, laugh-out-loud portrait of youth, cultural collision, and the unbridled joy of a summer adventure gone completely—and wonderfully—off the rails.