Overview

Our foremost storyteller returns with an audacious new novel, Machines Like Me. Random House presents the audiobook edition of Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, read by Billy Howle. Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding. Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever - a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma. Ian McEwan's subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions- what makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns of the power to invent things beyond our control.

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9781786142252

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Reviews

[Machines Like Me] traverses the muddled morality of Artificial Intelligence... This is new and exciting ground for McEwan, one of Britain's most consistently brilliant writers. -- Olivia Ovenden * Harper's Bazaar, *The Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2019* * McEwan returns with another ambitious, high-concept work... [exploring] some very timely moral dilemmas. * Economia, The pick of 2019 reads *

Machines Like Me reminds us that McEwan is once-in-a-generation talent, offering readerly pleasure, cerebral incisiveness and an enticing imagination. -- Lara Feigel * Spectator * Compelling... unforgettably strange... there are many pleasures and many moments of profound disquiet in this book, which reminds you of its author's mastery of the underrated craft of storytelling... [Machines Like Me] is morally complex and very disturbing, animated by a spirit of sinister and intelligent mischief that feels unique to its author. -- Marcel Theroux * Guardian * [McEwan is] as mordant a chronicler of the age as we have... Machines Like Me offers as good a primer on the multifarious anxieties that should afflict us all as anything catalogued as non-fiction . -- Bill Prince * GQ * Machines like Me displays... impressive richness. Excited by ideas and perceptive about emotions, encompassing cutting-edge science, philosophical speculation and lively social observation, it is funny, thought-provoking and politically acute... In this bravura performance, literary flair and cerebral sizzle winningly combine. -- Peter Kemp * Sunday Times * McEwan knows all the novelistic rules... [and his] restlessness when it comes to subject matter, even as he enters his seventies, is stunning... [Machines Like Me] shimmer[s] with relevance. -- Janan Ganesh * Financial Times *

[Machines Like Me] traverses the muddled morality of Artificial Intelligence... This is new and exciting ground for McEwan, one of Britain's most consistently brilliant writers. -- Olivia Ovenden * Harper's Bazaar, *The Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2019* * McEwan returns with another ambitious, high-concept work... [exploring] some very timely moral dilemmas. * Economia, The pick of 2019 reads * In [Machines Like Me], McEwan has taken his creativity into a subversive alternative 1980s London... the young couple at the centre of McEwan's story find out the danger in inventing things beyond our control. -- Rebecca Thomas * BBC News *

[Machines Like Me] traverses the muddled morality of Artificial Intelligence... This is new and exciting ground for McEwan, one of Britain's most consistently brilliant writers. -- Olivia Ovenden * Harper's Bazaar, *The Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2019* *

Author Information

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, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

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