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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

Jackets of Ian McEwan books, tiled diagonally against a blue background

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The essential Ian McEwan reading list

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

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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 eighteen 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

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

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.

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.

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

Ian McEwan

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

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