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The Child in Time

by Ian McEwan

THE CHILD IN TIME begins on a Saturday morning when Stephen Lewis and his 3-year-old daughter, Kate, go to the supermarket. As they wait in line, she is kidnapped -suddenly, inexplicably, without warning. The novel explores the effects of this harrowing event on Stephen and his wife, Julie. The novel's title comes from Stephen's awareness of time as it affects his missing child--hopelessly, as time goes by, he imagines her getting older--and himself, as he ranges backward into his own troubled childhood and forward to the devastating present trying to come to terms with his loss. THE CHILD IN TIME is one of the novels McEwan calls a story of "crisis and transformation, rites of passage of great intensity for characters." It won a 1987 Whitbread Prize.

Available editions of The Child in Time

	9780754003465, Audio Cassette, Chivers Audio Books, 1999 $299.88 (Used - Good) Other copies of 9780754003465

	9780224024990, Book, J. Cape, 1987 £3.85 (ACCEPTABLE) Other copies of 9780224024990

	9780007231522, Digital, HarperCollins Publishers Limited, None currently available

	9780395429129, Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987 $12.00 (VG+/VG ) Other copies of 9780395429129

	9780140112467, Paperback, Penguin Group USA, 1988 $4.99 (Used - Good) Other copies of 9780140112467

	9781856953429, Hardcover, Ulverscroft Large Print Books, 1997 $11.62 (Used - Good) Other copies of 9781856953429

	9780385497527, Paperback, Anchor Books, 1999 $7.00 (Good) Other copies of 9780385497527

Publisher Notes

Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, is confronted with the unthinkable: his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. In one horrifying moment, Stephen must absorb the deadly realization that she is gone. With extraordinary tenderness and insight, McEwan takes us in the dark territory of a marriage devastated by the loss of a child. Kate's absence sets Stephen and his wife, Julie, on separate paths. For Stephen, time seems to slow down, and ultimately, to turn on itself, to his own childhood. As Stephen struggles with his own grief, he also witnesses a descent into madness that is the result of a childhood never known. McEwan explores in haunting and beautiful prose the complicated logic of time: the distorted time of panic, time as we experienced it in love in bereavement, and time as it is lived by children, for whom the present always seems infinite. Eloquent and passionate, the novel concludes in a triumphant scene of love and hope that gives full rein to the author's remarkable gifts. 038548984601737On November 18, 1978, in Jonestown, a commune in the depths of the Guyanese jungle, 913 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones obeyed his orders to swallow fruit-flavored punch laced with cyanide. It was the worst mass suicide in modern history. The Peoples Temple had started out years before as a respectable church involved in community service and civil rights activism. Jim Jones's followers grew in number, and the organization gained prominence in the San Francisco community, recognized by such high-profile figures as Mayor George Moscone and Rosalyn Carter. But by the time Jones and his followers had begun their emigration to the"promised land" in Guyana, the group had become increasingly militant and paranoid. Deborah Layton saw that something was seriously wrong the minute she arrived in Jonestown, and six months before the massacre, she escaped the guarded compound she had imagined would be paradise. Her warnings to the press and to the U.S. State Department of an impending disaster fell on disbelieving ears: four days after her testimony in Washington, D.C., Congressman Leo Ryan, three reporters, and over nine hundred Peoples Temple members, including Layton's mother, were dead. Layton's return to the world outside of the Peoples Temple was slow and painful. Her brother remains in prison, the only person alive today held accountable for the tragedy. In this very personal account, Layton opens up the shadowy world of cults that pervade our existence and shows how any race, culture, or class of individuals can fall victim to a cult's strange allure. Vividly written and powerfully told, "Seductive Poison" is both an unflinching historical document and an enthralling story of intrigue, power, and m

Media Reviews

"This is my favorite of McEwan's works....It is the last of his works that features children and childhood--after that, he turns to more adult forms of love and hate....The main child in THE CHILD IN TIME (other than a lost little girl) is a man who wishes he were still a boy, and pretends to be one."

First Line

Subsidizing public transport had long been associated in the minds of both government and the majority of its public with the denial of individual liberty.

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