IAN McEWAN is the bestselling author of fifteen books, including the novels Sweet Tooth; Solar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both short-listed for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets.
"Absorbing."
--The New Yorker "McEwan presents a ferociously intelligent and
competent woman struggling to rule on a complex legal matter while
feeling humiliated and betrayed by her husband ... a notable volume
from one of the finest writers alive."
--Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"A short, concise, strong novel in which a judge's ruling decides
the fate of a teenage boy in ways she never intended or imagined
... it's a book that begins with the briskness of a legal brief
written by a brilliant mind, and concludes with a gracefulness
found in the work of few other writers."
--Meg Wolitzer, NPR
"A quietly exhilarating book ... The Children Act chronicles the
recalibration of a 30-year marriage after it has fallen out of
balance."
--Mona Simpson, Los Angeles Times
"Haunting ... a brief but substantial addition to the author's
oeuvre."
--Entertainment Weekly, A-
"[The Children Act's] sense of life-and-death urgency never wavers
... you would have to go back to Saturday or Atonement to find
scenes of equivalent intensity and emotional investment."
--Wall Street Journal "Smart and elegant ... a grown-up novel that
reminds us just how messy life can be and how the justice system
... doesn't always deliver justice."
--Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
"The Children Act manages to be highly subtle and page-turningly
dramatic at once ... Only a master could manage, in barely over 200
pages, to engage so many ideas, leaving nothing neatly
answered."
--Boston Globe "Heartbreaking and profound, it skillfully
juxtaposes the dilemmas of ordinary life and tabloid-ready
controversy."
--People
"McEwan crafts a taut morality tale in crystalline sentences."
--O Magazine "As in Atonement, what doesn't happen has the power to
destroy; as in Amsterdam, McEwan probes the dread beneath civilized
society. In spare prose, he examines cases, people, and situations,
to reveal anger, sorrow, shame, impulse, and yearning. He rejects
religious dogma that lacks compassion, but scrutinizes secular
morality as well ... Few will deny McEwan his place among the best
of Britain's living novelists."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"McEwan, always a smart, engaging writer, here takes more than one
familiar situation and creates at every turn something new and
emotionally rewarding in a way he hasn't done so well since On
Chesil Beach."
--Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Irrefutably creative ... With his
trademark style, which is a tranquil mix of exacting word choice
and easily flowing sentences, McEwan once again observes with depth
and wisdom the universal truth in the uncommon situation."
--Booklist, starred review
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