Black Dogs

Black Dogs

Ian Mcewan

Literature & Fiction

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.
Read online
  • 541
The Daydreamer

The Daydreamer

Ian Mcewan

Literature & Fiction

Peter Fortune is a daydreamer. He's a quiet ten year old who can't help himself from dropping out of reality and into the amazing world of his vivid imagination. His daydreams are fantastic and fascinating - only in the bizarre and disturbing world of dreams can he swap bodies with the family cat and his baby cousin, Kenneth, or wipe out his entire family with vanishing cream.
Read online
  • 533
The Cement Garden

The Cement Garden

Ian Mcewan

Literature & Fiction

Ian McEwan is known to skirt the edge with his writing; the fringes of society, to test the limits of what we can handle perhaps in our worlds as we bring his writing home with us and allow a whole new being to enter. So it is with The Cement Garden, the story of dying family who live in a dying part of the city. The father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents’ deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. ll of the children are free thinking independent-minded teenagers. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, the narrator who is entering adolescence with all of its curiosity and appetites that he must contend with (along with the sure confusion of what the children have done). Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions (like what is buried beneath the cement pile, etc), surely threatening the status quo (however morbid) that the children have come to accept as "normal" and as "home". We understand through McEwan that home is not to be defined by anyone else but it is, instead, what you know and have known that makes you feel safe, even if it is rather dangerous and macabre.
Read online
  • 378
Solar

Solar

Ian Mcewan

Literature & Fiction

An engrossing, satirical and very funny new novel on climate change. Michael Beard is in his late fifties; bald, overweight, unprepossessing — a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. An inveterate philanderer, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds are entwined in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself, a chance for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster. With a global scope, Solar is a comedy dealing directly with the crises of today. A story of one man's ambitions and self-deceptions, it is a startling and stylish new departure in the work of one of the world's great writers.
Read online
  • 315
The Telescope

The Telescope

Ian Mcewan

Literature & Fiction

The Telescope – A Journey Through Time and SecretsThe Telescope is a gripping adventure novel that blends history, mystery, and the supernatural. The story follows siblings Max and Lottie, along with their enigmatic Grandpa Ben, as they embark on a journey that begins with a seemingly ordinary compass. When the ancient artifact unexpectedly reawakens, it sets them on a path toward Oban, a coastal town where secrets whisper through the sea mist.Guided by cryptic messages and pursued by unknown forces, the trio uncovers a hidden past linked to the Druids—guardians of ancient knowledge. Along the way, they encounter figures both friend and foe, including the wary Walter Smith and the relentless agent Samuel Denton, whose own past may hold more in common with theirs than he realizes.As the story unfolds, Max discovers a powerful telescope, an artifact capable of revealing both past and future. But knowledge comes with a price. The...
Read online
  • 294
Atonement: a novel

Atonement: a novel

Ian Mcewan

Literature & Fiction

EDITORIAL REVIEW: On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions* Atonement* follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.
Read online
  • 268
Saturday

Saturday

Ian Mcewan

Literature & Fiction

In his triumphant new novel, Ian McEwan, the bestselling author of Atonement, follows an ordinary man through a Saturday whose high promise gradually turns nightmarish. Henry Perowne–a neurosurgeon, urbane, privileged, deeply in love with his wife and grown-up children–plans to play a game of squash, visit his elderly mother, and cook dinner for his family. But after a minor traffic accident leads to an unsettling confrontation, Perowne must set aside his plans and summon a strength greater than he knew he had in order to preserve the life that is dear to him. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Read online
  • 266
Nutshell

Nutshell

Ian Mcewan

Literature & Fiction

Nutshell is a classic story of murder and deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.
Read online
  • 183
The Cockroach

The Cockroach

Ian Mcewan

Literature & Fiction

A brilliant, of-the-moment political satire like no other: here is Ian McEwan's Brexit-era take on Kafka's Metamorphosis, centered on a cockroach transformed into the prime minister of England. An Anchor Original.That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a giant creature.Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain—and it is his mission to carry out the will of the people. Nothing must get in his way; not the opposition, nor the dissenters within his own party. Not even the rules of parliamentary democracy. In this bitingly funny Kafkaesque satire, Ian McEwan engages with scabrous humor a very recognizable political world and turns it on its head.
Read online
  • 144
Lessons

Lessons

Ian Mcewan

Literature & Fiction

From the best-selling author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it.When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into...
Read online
  • 44
183