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.

"A shocking book, morbid, full of repellant imagery--and irresistibly readable.... The effect achieved by McEwan's quiet, precise and sensuous touch is that of magic realism--a transfiguration of the ordinary that has far stronger retinal and visceral impact than the flabby surrealism of so many experimental novels." --New York Review of Books

"Possesses the suspense and chilling impact of Lord of the Flies." --Washington Post Book World

"Darkly impressive." --The Times

"A superb achievement: his prose has instant, lucid beauty and his narrative voice has a perfect poise and certainty. His account of deprivation and survival is marvellously sure, and the imaginative alignment of his story is exactly right." --Tom Paulin

"Marvellously creates the atmosphere of youngsters given that instant adulthood they all crave, where the ordinary takes on a mysterious glow and the extraordinary seems rather commonplace. It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable." --Sunday Times

"His writing is exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing." --The Times

"The Maestro." --New Statesman

"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." --John Fowles

"A sparkling and adventurous writer." --Dennis Potter

Publisher: Vintage

Pub date: 1994-01-13

Length: 160 pages