A guide to speculative fiction

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9 Vintage Paperback Novels to Add to Your Summer TBR Pile

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The best books about AI

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9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

With the dawn of a new millennium about to break, the Nineties was a strange, floating decade of positivity, hope and something called the World Wide Web. 

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Books that defined the 2000s

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Features

From sweaty to sultry: why fiction loves a heatwave

Where to Start with Ian McEwan 2025

Where to start reading Ian McEwan

An illustration of a woman sitting on a pile of copies of Mrs Dalloway, reading Mrs Dalloway, next to a shelf of other copies of Mrs Dalloway

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On the particular pleasures of re-reading

A photograph of four editions of Atonement

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Interviews

‘This novel had everything’: an oral history of Ian McEwan’s Atonement

From Alex Garland to James Joyce, Yaa Gyasi to Kate Chopin, here are some of the most memorable beach scenes captured in literature. 

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The most memorable beach scenes in literature

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Ian McEwan on rewriting the past: ‘it’s not quite a dystopia, it’s something slightly better than reality’

7 books about the dark side of growing up

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7 coming-of-age books about the dark side of growing up

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Ian McEwan on Briony Tallis

Black Dogs

His best yet, which I should make clear is saying a great deal

Brilliant...a meditation on the intoxications of violence and the redemptive power of love

Superbly evocative prose... The novel's vision of Europe is acute and alive, vivid in its moral complexities

Compassionate without resorting to sentimentality, clever without ever losing its honesty, an undisguised novel of ideas which is also Ian McEwan's most human work

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of nineteen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; Machines Like Me; and Lessons. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Black Dogs is a dark and brooding masterpiece from Booker-prize winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan. 
 
In 1946, June and Bernard set off on their honeymoon. Fired by their ideals and passion for one another, they had planned an idyllic holiday, but in France they witness an event that alters the course of their lives entirely. Forty years on, their son-in-law is trying to uncover the cause of their estrangement and is led back to this moment on honeymoon and an experience of such darkness it was to wrench the couple apart. 
 
‘Powerful... Unforgettable’ Sunday Telegraph 
 
‘Thoughtful and compassionate’ London Review of Books

The Comfort of Strangers

Rediscover the classic novel of love, violence and obsessions from Booker prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan. 
 
Colin and Mary are a couple whose intimacy knows no bounds. Away on a holiday together in a nameless city, they get lost one evening in a labyrinth of streets and canals. They happen upon Robert, a stranger with a dark history, who takes them to a bar and ushers them down into a subterranean land of violence and obsession. 
 
‘Haunting and compelling’ The Times 
 
‘No reader will begin The Comfort of Strangers and fail to finish it; a black magician is at work’ New York Times

In Between the Sheets

The second collection of blazingly original short stories from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling author Ian McEwan. 
 
A two-timing pornographer becomes the unwilling object of one of his victim's vengeful fantasies. A millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress – passive, yet beautiful – but the union soon becomes a nightmare of jealousy and despair. And an ape reflects on the relationship with a young female writer, mourning their fading love and musing on the fateful deceptions of art. In these seven stories of dream-like lucidity, the wasteland of the human psyche is mapped with deadly precision. 
 
‘Resonant and frightening...totally original’ Observer 
 
‘Exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing’ The Times

The Daydreamer

Ian McEwan writes stories of exquisite precision and clarity

As far-fetched and funny as anything by Roald Dahl

Perfectly judged, scary, poignant, meaningful; he makes it look easy, but this is brilliantly achieved

These stories are so good, as acute about childhood preoccupations, and at times as disturbing as you would expect

Brilliant...the quality of imagination at play here is something special

Peter Fortune is a boy who likes to daydream. He dreams about swapping bodies with his cat and with his baby cousin, but he gets so lost he's unsure where one fantasy finishes and the next begins. Cartwheeling through these transformations, Peter eventually finds himself in an adult body experiencing the adventure of falling in love. 
 
'As far-fetched and funny as anything by Roald Dahl' Vogue 
'Perfectly judged, scary, poignant, meaningful; he makes it look easy, but this is brilliantly achieved' Guardian

Solar

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: his wife is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster.

First Love, Last Rites

Marks the debut of a talented and genuinely imaginative writer

As promising a first collection of stories as I have ever come across

Ian McEwan writes to shock and succeeds... It is a tour-de-force of concision, and funny, too, in a deadpan manner

And now for a brand new writer of formidable talent, Ian McEwan who is 27. His stories First Love, Last Rites…are the most devastating debut I have seen for a long time

A brilliant debut by the most promising writer around

Now 40 years since first publication, McEwan's first published work is still his most hauntingly dark and atmospheric.

A talented and genuine imaginative writer. McEwan's details often grow into strange, powerful images - the ironies, throughout this impressive collection, are tellingly weighted

Ian McEwan writes to shock and succeeds... All his stories have a feeling of impending evil - it is a tour de force of concision, and funny, too, in a deadpan manner

His writing is exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing

McEwan has - a style and a vision of life of his own... No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary Britain can afford not to read him

Taut, brooding and densely atmospheric, these stories show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness.

The Child in Time

The Child in Time is an extraordinary achievement

It is marvellously written, moving, serious, readable... If you want to be appalled, refreshed, exhilarated, enlivened - read it

Artistically, morally, and politically, he excels

This book describes the panic of losing a child… The engulfing destructive pain is brilliantly explored

The Child in Time is a dense, atmospheric book as much concerned with philosophical debate as with plot.

The Child in Time is an extraordinary achievement in which form and content, theory and practice, are so expertly and inseparably interwoven that the novel becomes an advertisement for, or proof of, its own thesis.

Now a major BBC drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch 
 
'Only Ian McEwan could write about loss with such telling honesty' Benedict Cumberbatch 
 
On a routine trip to the supermarket with his daughter one Saturday morning, Stephen Lewis, a well-known writer of children's books, turns his back momentarily. When he looks around again, his child is gone. In a single moment, everything is changed. The kidnapping has a devastating effect on Stephen's life and marriage. Memories and the present become inseparable - as Stephen gets lost in daydreams of the past - and time bends back on itself, dragging Stephen's own childhood back into the present.

The Cement Garden

One of his very best… Deliciously disturbing.

An extremely assured, technically adept and compelling piece of work

Marvellously creates the atmosphere of youngsters given that instant adulthood they all crave, where the ordinary takes on a mysterious glow

A superb achievement: his prose has instant, lucid beauty and his narrative voice has a perfect poise and certainty. His account of deprivation and survival is marvellously sure, and the imaginative alignment of his story is exactly right

It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable

In the arid summer heat, four children – Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom – find themselves abruptly orphaned. All the routines of childhood are cast aside as the children adapt to a now parentless world. Alone in the house together, the children’s lives twist into something unrecognisable as the outside begins to bear down on them.

Sweet Tooth

Gloriously readable and, at times, wickedly funny

Sweet Tooth takes the expectations and tropes of the Cold War thriller and ratchets up the suspense, while turning it into something else... A well-crafted pleasure to read, its smooth prose and slippery intelligence sliding down like cream

Sublime...impressive...rich and enjoyable

A brilliant portrayal of 1970s Britain at its absolute worst… But it's also a gripping spy novel with some characteristic McEwan twists toward the end

A web of spying, subterfuge, deceit and betrayal... Acute, witty...winningly cunning

Playful, comic... This is a great big Russian doll of a novel, and in its construction – deft, tight, exhilaratingly immaculate – is a huge part of its pleasure...exerts a keen emotional pull

McEwan’s mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty story of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self

Fans of Ian McEwan should rejoice with the arrival of this novel... An extraordinary, irresistible work of fiction

One of the most hotly anticipated novels of the year...it's brilliant

I loved it. It reminded me of his most successful novel, Atonement

Ian McEwan proves he’s still the master penman with his twelfth novel

Enthralling, beguiling and totally addictive from the first page to the last… McEwan’s sense of time and place is authentic with his trademark attention to details of the social history of the period

McEwan’s prose is controlled, his observation forensic as ever... McEwan carries us with irresistible momentum to a surprise ending

Fans of Ian McEwan should rejoice with this arrival of this novel, because Sweet Tooth is McEwan's finest work since 2001's Atonement

Given McEwan’s ability to make riveting fiction out of English politics (not easy), it would be hard to imagine anyone better equipped to write such a story... Delicious... Gripping

His assumption of a female persona is pitch-perfect

Had McEwan, through Serena’s benefit of hindsight in narrating her life, planted the clues? Let every reader have the pleasure of finding out

An artful game of distortion... Clever handling

A curious piece of autobiographical fiction

A wisecracking thriller hightailing between love and betrayal, with serious counter-espionage credentials thrown in... This is ultimately a book about writing, wordplay and knowingness

No contemporary novelist is more enthralled by what goes on inside the human skull than Ian McEwan... Sweet Tooth, which juxtaposes contrasting casts of mind, reminds you that, as well as intelligence, the intelligence service fascinates McEwan... Always excellent at conjuring up places and periods on the cusp of dramatic change... McEwan atmospherically resurrects the strife-ridden Britain of 1972 -73... Similarities and contrasts between the mentality and mind games of the secret service and those of the creative writer are increasingly brought to the fore. Doubling back and forth across genre boundaries, Sweet Tooth takes risks: narrative loiterings and twists whose purpose isn’t at first apparent, a payoff that is long delayed. But – ideally read more than once – this acute, witty novel is a winningly cunning addition to McEwan’s fictional surveys of intelligence

Must read... Intrigue, love and mutual betrayal by a master of the art

The great thing about McEwan is that, despite his success, he continues to work hard, producing ever more accessible and entertaining stories

McEwan, as always, presents an engaging narrator... The plot is fantastic... McEwan plays with the readers expectations, and surpasses them all with a fabulous ending that makes me itch to re-read this superb novel all over again. Sweet Tooth marks another triumph for a brilliant British author

A pleasing, tricksy beast with a subsumed sense of metatextuality likely to be pleasing to his fans

A triumphant shedding of genre limitations

This most cunning of authors entertains and manipulates his readers. Sweet Tooth is a masterclass in the art of fiction

Ian McEwan is getting better and better… Supremely tense, intellectually sharp, and honed as hell

McEwan’ssmoothly contrived thriller hightails between love and betrayal, with serious counter-espionage credentials thrown in

An expertly crafted thriller written with a bucketload of suspense and wit

As richly textured as anything Ian McEwan has written

Brilliantly cunning… It’s a story of love, betrayal and duplicity, with the most startling deception reserved for the final pages

Playful, clever, knowing and full of stories

Supremely tense, intellectually sharp, and honed as hell

Beyond virtuoso twists and turns, McEwan lays out the foreign landscape of 40 years ago – from smoky pubs to fuming punditry – with wry, affectionate panache

The sense of narrative purpose exerts its pull from the first

'A web of spying, subterfuge, deceit and betrayal... Acute, witty...winningly cunning' Sunday Times 
 
The year is 1972, the Cold War is far from over and Serena Frome, in her final year at Cambridge, is being groomed for MI5. Sent on Operation Sweet Tooth - a highly secret undercover mission - she meets Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage - trust no one.

On Chesil Beach

Superb... The protagonists have everything to lose, and their faltering journey towards a point of no return is conjured into life my McEwan with irresistible subtlety, tact and force

On Chesil Beach is more than an event. It is a masterpiece

This is McEwan's mature style, one we have come to recognise from Atonement and Saturday. It is a polished, civilised style, and very distant from the shock tactics of his early work... McEwan brings Florence and Edward touchingly alive for us; and their seriousness, their idealism, and their desire for love draw us towards them

To commend an author for being reminiscent of Edith Wharton is a compliment that this reviewer reserves for a select few. Yet with On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan has earnt it

A master feat of concentration in both senses of the word

Written with a fierce pursuit of the truth and an utterly modern self-awareness, what a confidant tour de force this turns out to be

One of our greatest living writers. Many Easter weekends and train journeys will be enlivened by a compelling novella

It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly

A didactic, ironic novella of great accomplishment and calculated ambition. Structurally and linguistically, it is a triumph...intriguingly compassionate

It is a measure of McEwan's artistry that he is able here both to linger in the recording of sensuous particularities and at the same time to deliver the satisfactions of plot we are accustomed to deriving from his fiction

McEwan shares with his fellow English novelist Jim Crace not only an interest in history but in finding a style in prose that is slow-moving, yet compelling, at times stilted and dry, and then suddenly sharp and precise

The protagonists of On Chesil Beach have everything to lose, and their faltering journey towards a point of no return is conjured into life by McEwan with irresistible subtlety, tact and force

The book is steeped in lost hopes and disappointments, with each sentence as powerful as a Larkin poem. I didn't know a British novelist could still be this good

McEwan is word-perfect at handling the awkward comedy of this relationship and, as ever, turning it into something far more disturbing

Two characters so vibrant they step straight off the page

McEwan's brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate discrete moments in life and invest them with incredible significance

McEwan's style is lean and clear...every sentence feels carefully crafted, the words all perfectly in place

A tightly focused human drama... McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous... The bedroom scene itself is carried off brilliantly

A fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowered to devastating effect

McEwan is the kind of author who can say more in a sentence than most can say in a chapter...This is a thoughtful book which provokes thought. But more immediately than that, this is a book which, while managing to be very funny, gives us a wonderful and moving portrait of a specific time, and two of its hostages, and of how to make a mess of love

McEwan conveys the near-numinous significance of a single moment with quiet, almost unbearable grace

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE AND NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE 
 
A warm treat of a read for the cold winter nights. 
 
It is July 1962. Edward and Florence, young innocents married that morning, arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their private fears of the wedding night to come and, unbeknownst to them both, the events of the evening will haunt them for the rest of their lives. 
 
'McEwan brings Florence and Edward touchingly alive for us' Guardian

Saturday

Written with superb exactness, complex, suspenseful and humane, this novel reinforces his status as the supreme novelist of his generation

It's the good writing and the truthful and convincing way of rendering consciousness that makes Saturday so engrossing

Richly laden. McEwan pulls out all the stops. A rich book, sensuous and thoughtful. McEwan has found in Saturday the right form to showcase his dazzling talents

An exemplary novel... It is undoubtedly McEwan's best

He remains at the top of his game - assured, accomplished and ambitious

A book of great moral maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence... Everyone should read Saturday... Artistically, morally and politically, he excels

Saturday is wonderfully involving and affecting on every page. Everybody with any interest in contemporary literature will want to read it at once

A masterpiece of suspense and contemporary reflection

A book of great maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence... Everyone should read Saturday

A brilliant novel.It is McEwan writing on absolute top form

Refreshing and engrossing, dense with revelation. Superb

A rich book, sensuous and thoughtful... McEwan has found in Saturday the right form to showcase his dazzling talents

'Dazzling... Profound and urgent' Observer 
 
'A book of great maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence... Everyone should read Saturday' Financial Times 
 
Saturday, February 15, 2003. 
 
Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon, stands at his bedroom window before dawn and watches a plane - ablaze with fire like a meteor - arcing across the London sky. Over the course of the following day, unease gathers about Perowne, as he moves amongst hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors in the post-9/11 streets. 
 
A minor car accident brings him into confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive man, who to Perowne's professional eye appears to be profoundly unwell. But it is not until Baxter makes a sudden appearance at the Perowne family home that Henry's earlier fears seem about to be realised...

The Innocent

Into a Berlin wrenched between East and West, comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team. 
 
Though only a pawn in an international plot, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life. 
 
The promise of his new life begins to be fulfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team, while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex by Maria, a beautiful young German woman. 
 
It is a promise that turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening; a night when Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed. 
 
'The plot crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense' Sunday Times

Powerful and disturbing...a tour de force

To call The Innocent a spy novel would be like calling Lord of the Flies a boy's adventure yarn...it ensure McEwan's major status

The sheer cleverness of the book is dazzling, and only fully to be appreciated as you turn the last page

It's the most tightly plotted of Ian McEwan's novels, and to argue properly for its excellence would involve showing how the political and emotional themes are inseparable from its narrative ingenuity, the patterns of revelation and about-turn which mark its final pages

Generous in scale, simple in its hideous impact... Ironically, he has celebrated the obsequies of the East-West spy thriller by writing one of the subtlest

Deft, taut fiction... Many English writers have been compared to Evelyn Waugh, often wrongly, but this book can stand with the master's best

The plot crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense

So exhaustively suspenseful that it should be devoured at one sitting... McEwan fuses a spy-novel plot with themes as venerable as the myth of Adam and Eve

Has the spooky, crooked-angled, danger-around-every-corner feeling of a Carol Reid film. It reminded me often of The Third Man and that is no mean feat

The Innocent is a startlingly prescient novel from Booker prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan. 
 
Into a Berlin wrenched between East and West, comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in an international plot, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life. 
 
The promise of his new life begins to be fulfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team, while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex by Maria, a beautiful young German woman. It is a promise that turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening - a night when Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed. 
 
'The plot crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense' Mail on Sunday

Lessons

the Sunday Times bestselling new novel from the author of Atonement

The story of a life. The story of the year. 
 
'Lessons shows [McEwan] at the very peak of his powers. He has written his masterpiece' Daily Telegraph 
 
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. 
 
Twenty-five years later Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes, and he is left alone with their baby son. Her disappearance sparks of journey of discovery that will continue for decades, as Roland confronts the reality of his rootless existence and attempts to embrace the uncertainty - and freedom - of his future. 
 
'Ian McEwan is a masterful storyteller' Elif Shafak 
 
'A beautiful book about love, loss and regret' Observer 
 
'Luminous, beautifully written... about lives imperfectly lived' Vogue 
 
'A whole, unruly life between the covers of a single book: a literary feat' Spectator 
 
'A tour de force... A single life is silhouetted against global happenings' Sunday Times 
 
* A Book of the Year for The Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Spectator, New Statesman, Washington Post, Vogue and New Yorker *

Lessons is easily McEwan's most accomplished novel since Atonement... he offers intelligent reflection on his novel's evergreen themes.

I loved Lessons... Deep, life-affirming and A-grade storytelling.

Thoughtful, tender and both universal and timeless in its depiction of the follies of the human heart... Ian McEwan is a masterful storyteller who weaves destiny and self-determination, the past and the future, youth and age, and above all, the loss and memory of love.

Captures youthful lust and late-age regret with equal power.

Superb... another mesmerising, memorable novel.

McEwan's writing is as elegant and ideas-packed as ever.

Elegant and moving, it's his best work in 20 years.

McEwan returns with his best work since the Booker- and NBCC-winning Atonement...Throughout, McEwan poignantly shows how the characters contend with major historical moments while dealing with the ravages of daily life, which is what makes this so affecting. He also employs lyrical but pared-down prose to great effect . . . Once more, the masterly McEwan delights.

McEwan deftly explores the interplay of will and chance, time and memory.

Lessons should have made the Booker longlist (and shortlist) but no matter. It marks a significant new phase in McEwan's already astonishingly productive career - and may well be remembered as one of the finest humanist novels of its age.

Magnificent and moving, Lessons is up there with McEwan's greatest works.

The Booker-winning author has woven multiple versions of himself into Lessons, his 500-page masterpiece.

Superb... A wonderful author has delivered another mesmerising, memorable novel.

A tour de force of breadth... McEwan writes with invigorating alertness about social and political shifts over the past 70 years.

McEwan's prose always goes down like a cool drink, and its content is often trenchant...I'm delighted to have added this thoughtful, touching and historically grounded novel to my bookshelf.

A moving and masterful work that captures the essence of McEwan....The book's psychological astuteness and elegant prose, is a thrill to behold.

Compassionate and gentle, and so bereft of cynicism it feels almost radical....

Lessons has the wonderful freshness that comes when an author tries something new - along with McEwan's customary wit, insight and compassion.

McEwan's deft, descriptive prose charts the complexity of growing up and finding one's place in an ever-shifting world

[A] big, detailed, sweep of history: starting in the aftermath of World War Two and ending in lockdown. And there's lots going on here other than history too - family drama, tales from boarding school, and a vanishing wife

An expansive novel that finds the epic in domestic situations.

Lessons triumphantly achieves its primary aim of conveying the "commonplace and wondrous" intertwining of global history and everyday life.

One of his most humane and agreeable [novels].

[Lessons is] an epic tale with domesticity at its centre, encompassing a swathes of history, designed to make you think of the impact of events have on you and, in turn, the impact you make on the world.

Roland's journey is not easy, but the dramatic evocation of his struggles and setbacks means readers will follow him every step of the way

A literary feat of undeniable majesty.

Lessons... [is] so beautifully done as to provide abundant proof of why McEwan still occupies that number-one spot.

Lessons is deep and wide, ambitious and humble, wise and substantial. It is, to my mind, McEwan's best novel in 20 years because it is so alert to human texture and complexity... It marks a significant new phase in McEwan's already astonishingly productive career.

McEwan's literary reach is equal to the task of chronicling Roland's full life. The novel moves back and forth in time, shifting confidently from a long ago past to a vivid present, offering sharp dialogue, intense description, soulful meditations.

Lessons spans a long life and recounts each event in details... [McEwan's] skilful writing makes us keen to turn the pages.

Ian McEwan

Praise for What We Can Know

What We Can Know may well have created a new genre: the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine AS Byatt’s Possession crossed with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Dark academia meets the big id ...

An ambitious and an accomplished work of fiction, it’s…rewarding and thought-provoking

What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart

What We Can Know may well have created a new genre: the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine AS Byatt’s Possession crossed with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Dark academia meets the big id ...

An ambitious and an accomplished work of fiction, it’s…rewarding and thought-provoking

What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart

What We Can Know may well have created a new genre: the postapocalyptic campus novel. Imagine AS Byatt’s Possession crossed with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Dark academia meets the big id ...

An ambitious and an accomplished work of fiction, it’s…rewarding and thought-provoking

What We Can Know is a daring, beautiful novel, full of wisdom and heart

Books by Ian McEwan

Articles featuring Ian McEwan

A guide to speculative fiction

9 Vintage Paperback Novels to Add to Your Summer TBR Pile

The best books about AI

9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

Books that defined the 2000s

From sweaty to sultry: why fiction loves a heatwave

Where to start reading Ian McEwan

On the particular pleasures of re-reading

‘This novel had everything’: an oral history of Ian McEwan’s Atonement

The most memorable beach scenes in literature

Ian McEwan on rewriting the past: ‘it’s not quite a dystopia, it’s something slightly better than reality’

7 coming-of-age books about the dark side of growing up

Ian McEwan on Briony Tallis

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