The Innocent

Re-jacketed in stunning new series style for 2023, The Innocent is a startlingly prescient novel from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling Ian McEwan.The Innocent is a startlingly prescient novel from Booker prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan.Into a Berlin wrenched between East and West, comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in an international plot, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life.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.'The plot crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense' Mail on Sunday

“The plot crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense”

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
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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