Overview

Re-jacketed in stunning new series style, this is the first novel from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling Ian McEwan In the arid summer heat, four children - Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom - find themselves abruptly orphaned. All the routines of childhood are cast aside as the children adapt to a now parentless world. Alone in the house together, the children's lives twist into something unrecognisable as the outside begins to bear down on them.

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Reviews

Darkly impressive. -- The Times <br> A superb achievement: his prose has instant, lucid beauty and his narrative voice has a perfect poise and certainty. His account of deprivation and survival is marvellously sure, and the imaginative alignment of his story is exactly right. -- Tom Paulin <br> Marvellously creates the atmosphere of youngsters given that instant adulthood they all crave, where the ordinary takes on a mysterious glow and the extraordinary seems rather commonplace. It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable. -- Sunday Times <br> A shocking book, morbid, full of repellant imagery - and irresistibly readable...The effect achieved by McEwan's quiet, precise and sensuous touch is that of magic realism -- a transfiguration of the ordinary that has far stronger retinal and visceral impact than the flabby surrealism of so many experimental novels. -- New York Review of Books<br> <br> His writing is exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing. -- The Times<br> <br> The Maestro. -- New Statesman<br> <br> McEwan has--a style and a vision of life of his own...No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary Britain can afford not to read him. -- John Fowles <br> A sparkling and adventurous writer. -- Dennis Potter

Darkly impressive The Times An extremely assured, technically adept and compelling piece of work Observer A superb achievement: his prose has instant, lucid beauty and his narrative voice has a perfect poise and certainty. His account of deprivation and survival is marvellously sure, and the imaginative alignment of his story is exactly right -- Tom Paulin Marvellously creates the atmosphere of youngsters given that instant adulthood they all crave, where the ordinary takes on a mysterious glow and the extraordinary seems rather commonplace. It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable Sunday Times A shocking book, morbid, full of repellant imagery - and irresistibly readable...The effect achieved by McEwan's quiet, precise and sensuous touch is that of magic realism - a transfiguration of the ordinary that has far stronger retinal and visceral impact than the flabby surrealism of so many experimental novels New York Review of Books

There can be nothing but praise for how Ian McEwan writes: in his short stories (First Love, Last Rites, 1975) and in this new novella, he glories in the secret of how uninflected, almost unbearably lean, plain prose can grip, can scream without a single exclamation point. What McEwan writes is perhaps less cause for dancing in the streets. Here he returns to some of the adolescent preoccupations that peeked through the stories - masturbation, sibling sex - and, though all this is handled with impeccable taste and invested with authentic bitter-sweetness, one longs for adult material to match the fully matured style. Still, except for one aggressively Oedipal coincidence and an incestuous finale, The Cement Garden's adolescent sensibility works, on its own terms, quietly and stunningly. The Oedipal coincidence: acne-infested, broody narrator Jack, second oldest of four children, has his first ejaculation just as his frail father drops dead outside - father has been surrounding their English urban house with an even plane of concrete to cover the dirt and grass. With father gone and mother taking to her bed, the children - Jack, older Julie, younger Sue, little Tom - tussle for power, for each other's affection, and for attention from their mother, who has tired of doctors and one day quietly dies in bed. As in so many similar stories, the children fear being separated and so bury mother in the cellar, surrounding her with wet cement left over from father's weird concrete project. Now parentless, the house fills with debris and the children deteroriate: Julie attracts a pool-shark beau; Sue drifts off into reveries about mother; Tom wants to be a girl (his sisters approve and dress him up); Jack becomes obsessed with a science-fiction novel, a gutted nearby hi-rise, and masturbation. Only Jack and Julie's ultimate sexual coming-together - which, seen by the furious boyfriend, brings on the end of the children's closed-off world - seems staged for effect. And, most impressive of all, this grim little tale is somehow suffused with light and warmth. Having worked such wonders with such intrinsically stunted material, McEwan calls attention to his undeniable talent. If he and his characters can stretch to measure up to that prose, we may be watching a major novelist in the making. (Kirkus Reviews)

First published in 1978, this novel holds all the McEwan hallmarks: dark depravity, loss, childhood in an adult world and watertight characters with convincing emotions and motives. The story covers a few months in the life of Jack, one of four children in a dysfunctional family. The first signs of a this family's dark secrets are the sexual games the teenage siblings play with each other. The death of their father and not long afterwards their mother, bring them to darker deeds which echo the depravity of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Jack lives through these months in an agony of loneliness and confusion, not knowing how to communicate with his sisters or ask for help as manhood approaches. McEwan's brilliance lies in describing the slide towards depravity and shocking situations in such a way as to make them seem not only convincing, but inevitable. An accomplished tale of how adolescents can fail to grasp reality and respond appropriately. (Kirkus UK)

Darkly impressive The Times Marvellously creates the atmosphere of youngsters given that instant adulthood they all crave, where the ordinary takes on a mysterious glow and the extraordinary seems rather commonplace. It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable Sunday Times An extremely assured, technically adept and compelling piece of work Observer A shocking book, morbid, full of repellant imagery - and irresistibly readable...The effect achieved by McEwan's quiet, precise and sensuous touch is that of magic realism - a transfiguration of the ordinary that has far stronger retinal and visceral impact than the flabby surrealism of so many experimental novels New York Review of Books It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable Sunday Times

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 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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