The Innocent

Powerful and disturbing…a tour de force * New York Times *
To call The Innocent a spy novel would be like calling Lord of the Flies a boy’s adventure yarn…it ensure McEwan’s major status * Sunday Times *
The sheer cleverness of the book is dazzling, and only fully to be appreciated as you turn the last page * London Review of Books *
It’s the most tightly plotted of Ian McEwan’s novels, and to argue properly for its excellence would involve showing how the political and emotional themes are inseparable from its narrative ingenuity, the patterns of revelation and about-turn which mark its final pages * Guardian *
Generous in scale, simple in its hideous impact… Ironically, he has celebrated the obsequies of the East-West spy thriller by writing one of the subtlest * Mail on Sunday *
Deft, taut fiction… Many English writers have been compared to Evelyn Waugh, often wrongly, but this book can stand with the master’s best * The Times *
The plot crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense * Sunday Times *
So exhaustively suspenseful that it should be devoured at one sitting… McEwan fuses a spy-novel plot with themes as venerable as the myth of Adam and Eve * Newsweek *
Never less than wholly entertaining * Wall Street Journal *
Has the spooky, crooked-angled, danger-around-every-corner feeling of a Carol Reid film. It reminded me often of The Third Man and that is no mean feat * Washington Post Book World *

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. 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; and Nutshell, which was a Number One bestseller. Atonement and Enduring Love have both been turned into award-winning films, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach are in production and set for release this year, and filming is currently underway for a BBC TV adaptation of The Child in Time.

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