Books by Ian McEwan

On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence. Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer; Vernon is editor of the quality broadsheet The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact that will have consequences that neither has foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life. A wickedly sharp contemporary morality fable, cleverly disguised as a comic novel, "Amsterdam' is "as sheerly enjoyable a book as one is likely to pick up this year" (The Washington Post Book World).

“A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.” --John Updike, The New Yorker
“Flat-out brilliant. . . . Lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“A tour de force. . . . Every bit as affecting as it is gripping.” --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Luminous. . . . Atonement is brilliant and like nothing he’s ever written before.” –Newsweek

“No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan.” –The Washington Post Book World

“Brilliant. . . . McEwan could be the most psychologically astute writer working today, our era’s Jane Austen.” –Esquire

“A work of astonishing depth and humanity.” –The Economist

“His most complete and passionate book to date.” --The New York Times Book Review


“In the seriousness of its intentions and the dazzle of its language, Atonement made me starry-eyed all over again on behalf of literature’s humanizing possibilities.” –Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times

“Resplendent. . . . Graceful. . . . Magisterial. . . . Gloriously realized.” –The Boston Sunday Globe

“McEwan is technically at the height of his powers.” –The New York Review of Books

“Astonishing. . . . [with] one of the most remarkable erotic scenes in modern fiction. . . . [It] is something you will never forget.” –Chicago Tribune

“Enthralling. . . . With psychological insight and a command of sensual and historical detail, Mr. McEwan creates an absorbing fictional world.” –The Wall Street Journal

“[Atonement] hauls a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the 21st century.” –The Guardian

“Astonishing. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Bewitching. . . . A thought-provoking, luxuriant novel.” –Minneapolis Star Tribune

“McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive. . . . [Atonement] implants in the memory a living, flaming presence.” –James Wood, The New Republic

“[McEwan’s] best novel so far. . . . It will break your heart.” –The Star (Toronto)

“A masterpiece of moral inquiry. . . . Beautiful and wrenching.” –New York

“A first-rate novel on any scale. . . . His most expansive and ambitious book. . . . Few, if any, novelists writing today match McEwan in ingenuity and plotting.” –Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Magnificent. . . . McEwan forces his readers to turn the pages with greater dread and anticipation than does perhaps any other ‘literary’ writer working in English today.” –Claire Messud, The Atlantic Monthly

“The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there’s nothing McEwan can’t do.” –The Christian Science Monitor

“Magically readable. . . . Never has McEwan shown himself to be more in sympathy with the vulnerability of the human heart.” –Sunday Times (London)

“Magnificent. . . . Suspenseful, psychologically astute and intellectually bracing.” –Newsday

“Not since the 19th century has a writer stepped in and out of his characters’ minds with such unfettered confidence.” –The Plain Dealer

“A novel of artistry, power and truth that puts it among the most extraordinary works of fiction of the last decade. . . . It is, quite simply, magnificent–a masterpiece.” –Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun

“Magical. . . . A love story, a war story, and a story about stories, and so it hits the heart, the guts and the brain.” –The New York Observer

“Luminous. . . . McEwan’s writing has often made me blink, but never before blink with emotion. . . . [McEwan] is at one with his talent.” –Robert Cremins, Houston Chronicle

“Atonement can’t be laid down once it’s been picked up. . . . [McEwan] can write rings around most others writing in English today.” –The Weekly Standard

ATONEMENT, which Ian McEwan has called his "Jane Austen novel," is divided into three sections, reaching from the first chapter, set in 1935, to a startling coda in the early 2000s. In between is wartime Europe and a group of nurses tending to wounded soldiers; this section also describes the aftermath of the battle of Dunkirk, in which McEwan's father fought. (McEwan gives his father, who died just before ATONEMENT was published, a walk-on part.) The story revolves around a disastrous misunderstanding by a young teenage girl, which leads to a tragic series of events that culminate in a stunning surprise ending. ATONEMENT was short-listed for the 2001 Booker Prize. A New York Times "Editor's Choice" for 2002.

One of today's most celebrated novelists returns with a novel about family and political loyalties at the end of the Cold War. Writing a memoir of his parents-in-law, Jeremy relates the strange events that brought June and Bernard Tremaine together and set them apart. McEwan is the author of The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers.

In this tour de force of psychological unease--now a major motion picture starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Sinead Cusack--McEwan excavates the ruins of childhood and uncovers things that most adults have spent a lifetime forgetting--or denying. "Possesses the suspense and chilling impact of Lord of the Flies."--Washington Post Book World.

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

While on holiday, a young couple meets the son of the local gentry and his wife and are drawn by sexual obsession into a nightmare of violence.

With a foreword by Ian McEwan, this book tells the moving story of Dave's search for the family that had given him up, and the astonishing secrets that lay behind his biological parents' 'complete surrender' of him.

An imaginative tenyearold boy, who is best understood by his family, recounts some of the adventures he has while daydreaming, in a novel by the Booker Prizewinning author of Amsterdam.

The bestselling author of "The Innocent" spins a tale of life intruded upon. After attempting to rescue a child from a runaway hot-air balloon, Joe Rose finds himself part of a living nightmare of suspicion and obsession.

McEwan's first book, a collection of short stories, won him the nickname Ian Macabre.

Misfits, freaks, perverts and outcasts populate the grisly world and strange, macabre tales of obsession, sex and death in Ian McEwan's short stories.

After the death of his mother, young Mark goes to live with relatives, only to fall prey to the machinations and intrigues of his malevolent cousin Henry, who is plotting to kill off his own family. Book available. Movie tie-in.

Three plays for television by Ian McEwan, published in1981.

McEwan employs the erotic and the unusual to explore the expanses of darkness within us all in this collection of seven stories that are at once comic, macabre, and sinister.

The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and West, between past and present, comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life -- and to lose his unwanted innocence. 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.

This book examines and explains the obsession with history in the contemporary British novel. It frames these "historical" novels as expressions of narrative desire, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between a desire to disclose and to rid ourselves of anxieties elicited by the past. Scrutinizing representative novels from Byatt, McEwan and Rushdie, contemporary fiction is revealed as capable of advocating a viable ethical stance and as a form of authentic commentary. Our anxieties often exist in response to what might be perceived as the oppression or eradication of values, whether this is through the modern repudiation of Victorian principles (Byatt), the Western rethinking of Enlightenment narratives in light of the Holocaust (McEwan), or pluralism threatened by religious fundamentalism (Rushdie). Each of these novelists differentially employs postmodern artifice, sometimes as a way to reject the notion of historical construction, sometimes to advocate for it, but always to bring us closer to what

This slim, subtle, and devastating novella from Ian McEwan uses surgical precision to expose the psychological slips and physical mischances that threaten to ruin a young couple's happiness on their wedding night. The novel is set in the early 1960s, in a time when sexuality still had an aura of the arcane and forbidden, and Edward and Florence's first sexual encounter has become a source of anxiety and apprehension for both of them, though for very different reasons. With an adroit touch, McEwan traces the interpersonal feints and parries between the two young lovers, and shows how the slightest action or inaction can make a life skid toward tragedy.

In Ian McEwan's screenplay (filmed in 1984 and directed by Richard Eyre), a conniving and ambitious journalist named James Penfield, not satisfied with simply using people to advance his career, stoops to outright deception when he writes a distorted account of the 1956 Suez Crisis. McEwan not only paints a portrait of a ruthless man who gets his comeuppance, but provides a window into the destructive, self-serving rigidities of the British establishment.

Saturday is a novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children, who are young adults. Henry wakes to the relative comfort of his home on this, his day off. He is almost as comfortable here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before and his children are now grown and making their way into this world as adults.

On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne’s day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary: from an unusual sighting in the early morning sky to his usual squash game, and from trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of war protestors filling the streets of London, to a seemingly minor car accident.

Ian McEwan has written a masterful novel that keeps you balanced on the edge of your seat as Perowne’s happy safe world is unexpectedly shattered. At the heart of this extraordinary novel is the acute awareness of the details of our relationships, of life and of love, and the unforeseen violence that can threaten our peace.