Lessons

I loved Lessons... Deep, life-affirming and A-grade storytelling * The Times * Captures youthful lust and late-age regret with equal power * Financial Times * Superb... another mesmerising, memorable novel * Independent * Irresistible and a joy to read -- Antony Beevor * Spectator, Books of the Year * McEwan deftly explores the interplay of will and chance, time and memory * Washington Post * McEwan's writing is as elegant and ideas-packed as ever * The Times * McEwan returns with his best work since the Booker- and NBCC-winning Atonement . . . Throughout, McEwan poignantly shows how the characters contend with major historical moments while dealing with the ravages of daily life, which is what makes this so affecting. He also employs lyrical but pared-down prose to great effect . . . Once more, the masterly McEwan delights. * Publishers Weekly [starred review] * Lessons should have made the Booker longlist (and shortlist) but no matter. It marks a significant new phase in McEwan's already astonishingly productive career - and may well be remembered as one of the finest humanist novels of its age. * New Statesman * Magnificent and moving, Lessons is up there with McEwan's greatest works. -- Independent The Booker-winning author has woven multiple versions of himself into Lessons, his 500-page masterpiece. -- Andrew Billen * The Times * Superb... A wonderful author has delivered another mesmerising, memorable novel. * Independent * A tour de force of breadth... McEwan writes with invigorating alertness about social and political shifts over the past 70 years. * Sunday Times * McEwan's prose always goes down like a cool drink, and its content is often trenchant...I'm delighted to have added this thoughtful, touching and historically grounded novel to my bookshelf. -- Lionel Shriver * Financial Times * A moving and masterful work that captures the essence of McEwan....The book's psychological astuteness and elegant prose, is a thrill to behold. * Irish Independent * Compassionate and gentle, and so bereft of cynicism it feels almost radical.... -- Beejay Silcox * Guardian * Lessons has the wonderful freshness that comes when an author tries something new - along with McEwan's customary wit, insight and compassion. * Sunday Express * McEwan's deft, descriptive prose charts the complexity of growing up and finding one's place in an ever-shifting world * Cultur Whisper * [A] big, detailed, sweep of history: starting in the aftermath of World War Two and ending in lockdown. And there's lots going on here other than history too - family drama, tales from boarding school, and a vanishing wife * You Magazine, Mail on Sunday * An expansive novel that finds the epic in domestic situations. * List * Lessons triumphantly achieves its primary aim of conveying the "commonplace and wondrous" intertwining of global history and everyday life. * Daily Telegraph *

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.