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The Cement Garden

The Cement Garden

In the relentless summer heat, four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy, isolated world, and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves...

Reviews

  • A macabre but unforgettable tale

    John Boyne, Guardian

  • Darkly impressive

    The Times

  • Marvellously creates the atmosphere of youngsters given that instant adulthood they all crave, where the ordinary takes on a mysterious glow and the extraordinary seems rather commonplace. It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable

    Sunday Times

  • An extremely assured, technically adept and compelling piece of work

    Observer

  • A shocking book, morbid, full of repellant imagery - and irresistibly readable...The effect achieved by McEwan's quiet, precise and sensuous touch is that of magic realism - a transfiguration of the ordinary that has far stronger retinal and visceral impact than the flabby surrealism of so many experimental novels

    New York Review of Books

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About the Author

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen 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; 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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Events

Lessons: Ian McEwan in conversation, 14 September 2022
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News

Ian McEwan addresses Britain’s current political chaos in new satirical novella ‘The Cockroach'

The author to follow Machines Like Me with a ‘political satire in the old tradition’ this month.
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Features

Ian McEwan on rewriting the past and artificial intelligence: 'it's not quite a dystopia, it's something slightly better than reality'

From alternative realities to machine learning, Ian McEwan discusses the questions raised in Machines Like Me and how the dytopian novel is really about the present.

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