McEwan, I: Sweet Tooth

Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency.

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.

"No contemporary novelist is more enthralled by what goes on inside the human skull than Ian McEwan... Doubling back and forth across genre boundaries, Sweet Tooth takes risks...this acute, witty novel is a winningly cunning addition to McEwan's fictional surveys of intelligence." -- Peter Kemp Sunday Times "Playful, comic... This is a great big Russian doll of a novel, and in its construction - deft, tight, exhilaratingly immaculate - is a huge part of its pleasure." -- Julie Myerson Observer "A thoroughly clever novel...a sublime novel about novels, about writing them and reading them and the spying that goes on in doing both...very impressive...rich and enjoyable." -- Lucy Kellaway Financial Times "Gave us another of his delightful posh-totty narrators, young Serena Frome, who is recruited into the intelligence services in the 1970s." -- Kate Saunders The Times "What you see is not what you get, and the twist at the end reminds us of how many of this author's works confound readers imaginations... A well-crafted pleasure to read, its smooth prose and slippery intelligence sliding down like cream." -- Amanda Craig Independent