Nutshell

A creative gamble that pays off brilliantly…Witty and gently tragic, this short, bewitching novel is an ode to humanity’s beauty, selfishness and inextinguishable longing.

Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday

Ian McEwan’s embryonic spin on Hamlet is a virtuoso feat of wordplay … Virtuoso entertainment.

Tim Adams, Observer

While the literary device of an unborn baby narrating a novel from the womb is hardly original… Ian McEwan employs it with aplomb... Here everything is tightly controlled and the tension ratchets up as our all-knowing unborn watches helplessly from his watery sack while the dastardly plan progresses through a series of nail-biting moments… The ending is beautifully contrived… The book is elegantly written with plenty of pungent, topical observations upon the world.

John Harding, Daily Mail

At once playful and deadly serious, delightful and frustrating it is one of McEwan’s hardest to categorise works, and all the more interesting for it.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times

Nutshell is an orb, a Venetian glass paperweight, of a book; a place where, be warned , it puts you in the quoting mood…it is a consciously late, deliberately elegiac , masterpiece, a calling together of everything McEwan has learned and knows about his art.

Kate Clanchy, Guardian

A very alternative Hamlet… the tension ratchets up as our all-knowing unborn watches helplessly from his watery sack while the dastardly plan progresses through a series of nail-biting moments… The book is elegantly written with plenty of pungent, topical observations upon the world its narrator will soon be emerging into.

Daily Mail, John Harding

One of the most hilariously unlikely narrators in contemporary fiction.

Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times

A fast, arch beach read… A psychological thriller with a bad marriage and murder at its centre… McEwan has thrown in Gone Girl intrigue with The Girl on the Train suspense and given us his take on how toxic a marriage can get when spliced with a Shakespearean cast. Who knew McEwan could mix high and low literary genres to create such a bizarrely readable mash-up?

Arifa Akbar, Independent

The book’s finest exploration is of poetry. The author offers up everything he knows about its intensity, and why he loves it so. It is clear Mr McEwan has had enormous fun writing Nutshell; now it is the reader’s turn to be entertained too. Dark as it is, this novel is a thing of joy.

The Economist