**The Number One Sunday Times bestseller**
A Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Irish Times / Spectator / Sunday
Times / The Times Book of the Year
Nutshell is a classic story of murder and revenge, told by a
narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent
literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work
from a true master.
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.
"An astonishing act of literary ventriloquism unlike any in recent
literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work
from a true master… Told from a perspective unlike any other,
Nutshell is a shocking tale of murder and treachery from one of the
world’s master storytellers."
*Daily Telegraph*
"A creative gamble that pays off brilliantly…Witty and gently
tragic, this short, bewitching novel is an ode to humanity’s
beauty, selfishness and inextinguishable longing."
*Mail on Sunday*
"Ian McEwan’s embryonic spin on Hamlet is a virtuoso feat of
wordplay … Virtuoso entertainment."
*Observer*
"While the literary device of an unborn baby narrating a novel from
the womb is hardly original… Ian McEwan employs it with aplomb...
Here everything is tightly controlled and the tension ratchets up
as our all-knowing unborn watches helplessly from his watery sack
while the dastardly plan progresses through a series of nail-biting
moments… The ending is beautifully contrived… The book is elegantly
written with plenty of pungent, topical observations upon the
world."
*Daily Mail*
"At once playful and deadly serious, delightful and frustrating it
is one of McEwan’s hardest to categorise works, and all the more
interesting for it."
*The Times*
"Nutshell is an orb, a Venetian glass paperweight, of a book; a
place where, be warned , it puts you in the quoting mood…it is a
consciously late, deliberately elegiac , masterpiece, a calling
together of everything McEwan has learned and knows about his
art."
*Guardian*
"A very alternative Hamlet… the tension ratchets up as our
all-knowing unborn watches helplessly from his watery sack while
the dastardly plan progresses through a series of nail-biting
moments… The book is elegantly written with plenty of pungent,
topical observations upon the world its narrator will soon be
emerging into."
*John Harding*
"One of the most hilariously unlikely narrators in contemporary
fiction."
*Sunday Times*
"A fast, arch beach read… A psychological thriller with a bad
marriage and murder at its centre… McEwan has thrown in Gone Girl
intrigue with The Girl on the Train suspense and given us his take
on how toxic a marriage can get when spliced with a Shakespearean
cast. Who knew McEwan could mix high and low literary genres to
create such a bizarrely readable mash-up?"
*Independent*
"The book’s finest exploration is of poetry. The author offers up
everything he knows about its intensity, and why he loves it so. It
is clear Mr McEwan has had enormous fun writing Nutshell; now it is
the reader’s turn to be entertained too. Dark as it is, this novel
is a thing of joy."
*The Economist*
"McEwan’s latest novel features all his hallmarks: elegant
plotting, suspense, good characterisation and a chilling awareness
of just how unpleasant people can be… Witty and thoughtful, this
short, engaging novel punches well above its weight."
*Daily Express*
"As we read this tight little novel — like a foetus in the womb —
grows into something much grander and weightier than itself."
*Spectator*
"McEwan has always been an artist in the Alfred Hitchcock vein in
that what’s most interesting and appealing about his work tends to
come from his extreme technical mastery of his medium."
*Financial Times*
"[A] crisp, cool tale [which] contains, in a nutshell, the kernel
of Hamlet… The real wonder is that this novel’s deft, light prose
and belting pulse-rate can transport all this freight. Every
sentence has its ghost, every word its pun. The bard’s wisdom
becomes the novelist’s wit… Nutshell is a high-risk, high-wire act,
brilliantly executed."
*Times Literary Supplement*
"McEwan carries it off with aplomb… [Nutshell] brims with life. In
a nutshell, shall we say, it’s a corker."
*Tatler*
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