Editions

The Innocent

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099277095

  • Length: 240  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 210g

  • RRP: £8.99

The Innocent

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

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099277095

  • Length: 240  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 210g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

  • The plot crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense

    Sunday Times

  • Powerful and disturbing...a tour de force

    New York Times

  • 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

    Sunday Times

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

    London Review of Books

  • 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

    Mail on Sunday

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About the Author

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. 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; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Ian McEwan

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