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New from the bestselling author of Atonement and The Children Act.
Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home - a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse - but John's not there. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.
Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world's master storytellers.
"Starred Review. Packed with humor and tinged with suspense, this gem resembles a sonnet the narrator recalls hearing his father recite: brief, dense, bitter, suggestive of unrequited and unmanageable longing, surprising, and surprisingly affecting." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. The unborn baby boy is determined to interfere with how the situation plays out. But how? For all intents and purposes, he is trapped. Nevertheless, he takes matters into his tiny little hands, which brings this ingenious tour de force to its stunning conclusion." - Booklist
"Starred Review. McEwan joins Eric D. Goodman (Womb: A Novel in Utero) and Emma Donoghue (Room) in penning an expansive meditation on stability and identity from a confined perspective." - Library Journal
"Clever, likable, and yet unsatisfying, this tale too often bears out the narrator's early claim: 'I take in everything, even the trivia - of which there is much.'" - Kirkus
"...McEwan makes the story over into a brutally effective howdunnit, magnificently strong on the details of murder: the hats, gloves and waxed fingertips of it, the intimate workings of poison. Once the deed is done, he turns it into an even more effective will-be-they-be-dun-for-it, one that does not give up its secrets until the last page." - The Guardian, Kate Clanchy
This information about Nutshell was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of nineteen 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.
If you liked Nutshell, try these:
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