Awards

• Winner of Whitbread Book Awards: Novel Category 1987
• Winner of Whitbread Book Awards: Novel Category 1987.
• Winner of Whitbread Prize (Novel) 1987
• Winner of Whitbread Prize (Novel) 1987.

Overview

Rejacketed in a stunning new series style for 2023, The Child in Time is the extraordinary novel behind the major BBC drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch Now a major BBC drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch 'Only Ian McEwan could write about loss with such telling honesty' Benedict Cumberbatch On a routine trip to the supermarket with his daughter one Saturday morning, Stephen Lewis, a well-known writer of children's books, turns his back momentarily. When he looks around again, his child is gone. In a single moment, everything is changed. The kidnapping has a devastating effect on Stephen's life and marriage. Memories and the present become inseparable - as Stephen gets lost in daydreams of the past - and time bends back on itself, dragging Stephen's own childhood back into the present.

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Reviews

The Child in Time is an extraordinary achievement in which form and content, theory and practice, are so expertly and inseparably interwoven that the novel becomes an advertisement for, or proof of, its own thesis. -- Sheila Macleod Guardian

The Child in Time is an extraordinary achievement in which form and content, theory and practice, are so expertly and inseparably interwoven that the novel becomes an advertisement for, or proof of, its own thesis. -- Sheila Macleod Guardian 19870911

Spooky...a wonderful novel * Observer * The Child in Time is an extraordinary achievement * Guardian * It is marvellously written, moving, serious, readable... If you want to be appalled, refreshed, exhilarated, enlivened - read it * Sunday Times * His masterpiece -- Christopher Hitchens Artistically, morally, and politically, he excels * The Times *

Spooky...a wonderful novel * Observer * The Child in Time is an extraordinary achievement * Guardian * It is marvellously written, moving, serious, readable... If you want to be appalled, refreshed, exhilarated, enlivened - read it * Sunday Times * His masterpiece -- Christopher Hitchens Artistically, morally, and politically, he excels * The Times *

With none of his previous delight in things macabre, McEwan sets a story of domestic horror against a disorienting exploration in time, and ends up with a work of remarkable intellectual and political sophistication - his most expansive and passionate fiction to date. The time of the novel is an era not so unlike our own; the licensed beggars working the London streets are a product of post-Thatcher extremism - a period of even further privatization and more brutal self-interest. Stephen Lewis, once a countercultural type, then a successful children's book author, now sleepwalks through the neo-Hobbesian landscape. Having had his three-year, old daughter stolen in the supermarket, he's also lost his wife, Julie, a violinist who shares a perverse collusion in unhappiness with her guilt-ridden spouse. The only interruption in his routine of booze and the boob-tube is his weekly committee meetings at Whitehall on Reading and Writing subcommittee of the Official Commission on Child Care. Stephen's friend and former publisher, Charles Drake, a self-made millionaire and rightist M.P., is being groomed for greater things by the P.M. But after appointing Stephen to the Commission, Charles abandons politics in pursuit of the childhood he never had. While his wife, a former professor, writes about the physics of time, Charles - now completely mad - retreats into his life-threatening treehouse. Stephen meanwhile wanders in and out of time, reliving that tragic day at the market, recalling his own childhood as an RAF brat, and experiencing in the present a number of infantilizing episodes. Once he realizes, though, that all the sorrow. . .had been enclosed within meaningful time, within the richest unfolding conceivable, he recovers from his political quiescence, his creative doldrums, and, most importantly, the numbness which delayed mourning. With spiritual rebirth comes a literal birth - Julie and Stephen's, and McEwan's, quiet affirmation of life. Though intensely cinematic, this subtle and complex novel would require a director of like narrative daring and imaginative genius. (Kirkus Reviews)

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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