New Releases by Ian McEwan

BLACKWELL’S BOOK OF THE YEAR • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2025 • The Atlantic’s Top 10 • The Standard’s Best 2025 Titles to Buy for Book Lovers • Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Globe and Mail • New York Times • The Washington Post • The New Yorker • NPR • Barnes & Noble • Kirkus • Audible • The Guardian • ELLE • The Conversation • Vanity Fair • The Boston Globe • The Economist “A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “[What We Can Know] gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing. . . . It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages. It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times “[What We Can Know is] brilliantly, and surprisingly, plotted. . . . [McEwan] demonstrates with shocking intensity how little we can ever really grasp about the strange evasions of the heart.” —The Washington Post From the Booker prize–winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known. 2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery. 2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well. What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From the Booker Prize-winning author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Vogue • The New Yorker “Masterful.... McEwan is a storyteller at the peak of his powers…. One of the joys of the novel is the way it weaves history into Roland’s biography…. The pleasure in reading this novel is letting it wash over you.” —Associated Press When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life. Haunted by lost opportunities, Roland seeks solace through every possible means—music, literature, friends, sex, politics, and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without causing damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past? Epic, mesmerizing, and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times—a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man's lifetime.

McEwan esmola els ullals: una sàtira mordaç de l’Anglaterra del Brexit i l’Europa dels populismes. Ian McEwan presenta una sàtira corrosiva de l’Anglaterra del Brexit i l’Europa dels populismes. L’arrencada de la novel·la és una reelaboració del famosíssim començament de La metamorfosi de Kafka. Però aquí s’inverteixen els termes i ens trobem amb una panerola que, un bon dia, quan es desperta, descobreix que s’ha convertit en un ésser humà enorme, concretament el primer ministre del Regne Unit, anomenat Jim Sams. I no és l’única panerola transformada en polític. El primer ministre invoca el poble per situar-se per sobre de tot i de tothom: l’oposició, els dissidents del seu propi partit i fins i tot el Parlament i les normes més elementals de la democràcia. El seu projecte estrella passa per posar en pràctica una absurda teoria econòmica anomenada «reversalisme» i canviar així la direcció del flux dels diners, de manera que cal pagar per treballar i es reben diners quan es compra. Una fórmula màgica que suposadament ho solucionarà tot. McEwan recorre a Kafka per retratar una realitat que té molt de kafkiana, però el gran referent d’aquesta sàtira és Jonathan Swift, un dels mestres en l’art de servir-se de l’humor per posar en evidència l’estultícia i combatre-la. Des de la perplexitat i la indignació, McEwan ha escrit un llibre d’emergència, contundent i divertit, que denuncia l’alarmant degradació de la classe política.

From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—”a sharply intelligent novel of ideas” (The New York Times) that asks whether a machine can understand the human heart, or whether we are the ones who lack understanding. Set in an uncanny alternative 1982 London—where Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence—Machines Like Me powerfully portrays two lovers who will be tested beyond their understanding. 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 generation of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he codesigns Adam's personality. The near-perfect human that emerges is beautiful, strong, and smart—and a love triangle soon forms. Ian McEwan's subversive, gripping 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 against the power to invent things beyond our control.

Henry Perowne es un hombre feliz. Tiene cuarenta y siete años, es un reconocido neurocirujano y está casado con Rosalind, una abogada que lleva los asuntos legales de un importante periódico. Y ambos disfrutan con su trabajo, se quieren y quieren a sus hijos, un prometedor músico y una joven poeta, y gozan de una confortable vida de placeres tranquilos e íntimas satisfacciones. Es sábado, el comienzo del fin de semana de descanso de Henry. Y es 15 de febrero de 2003, el día de las grandes manifestaciones contra la inminente guerra de Irak. Henry se despierta antes del amanecer, va hacia la ventana de su dormitorio, y en la fría media luz de la mañana que empieza ve un avión en llamas, o eso le parece, que sobrevuela Londres muy bajo, en una trayectoria inesperada. Y en estos tiempos de estrépito y miedo, Henry teme lo peor: un accidente terrible, un ataque terrorista. Más tarde, escuchando la radio y tomando café con su hijo, que vuelve de un concierto y aún no se ha acostado, sabrá que se trata de un aterrizaje forzoso, de un avión de mercancías ruso en dificultades. Y Henry volverá a dormir, y hará el amor con su mujer, y se irá luego a su partida de squash semanal. Pero la visión nocturna no habrá sido sino el presagio de la realidad, de esa realidad azarosa, brutal, ciega, que irrumpirá en la plácida burbuja de su vida tan armoniosa...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “suspenseful, dazzlingly clever and gravely profound” (The Washington Post) novel that brilliantly recasts Shakespeare and lends new weight to the age-old question of Hamlet's hesitation, from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Trudy has been unfaithful to her husband, John. What’s more, she has kicked him out of their marital home, a valuable old London town house, and in his place is his own brother, the profoundly banal Claude. The illicit couple have hatched a scheme to rid themselves of her inconvenient husband forever. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy’s womb. As Trudy’s unborn son listens, bound within her body, to his mother and his uncle’s murderous plans, he gives us a truly new perspective on our world, seen from the confines of his.

Le avventure inquietanti e rocambolesche di Peter Fortune, un bambino che sogna a occhi aperti per sfuggire alla noia e alla normalità della vita. Il libro più letto e amato di McEwan.

A brilliant, emotionally wrenching novel from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement about a leading High Court judge who must resolve an urgent case—as well as her crumbling marriage. One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, BookRiot “Fantastically pleasurable.... Anything we want a novelist to do, he can do.... Unsurpassable.” —Chicago Tribune Fiona Maye is a leading High Court judge who presides over cases in the family division. She is renowned for her fierce intelligence, exactitude, and sensitivity. But her professional success belies private sorrow and domestic strife. There is the lingering regret of her childlessness, and now her marriage of thirty years is in crisis. At the same time, she is called on to try an urgent case: Adam, a beautiful seventeen-year-old boy, is refusing for religious reasons the medical treatment that could save his life, and his devout parents echo his wishes. Time is running out. Should the secular court overrule sincerely expressed faith? In the course of reaching a decision, Fiona visits Adam in the hospital—an encounter that stirs long-buried feelings in her and powerful new emotions in the boy. Her judgment has momentous consequences for them both.

Sous la canicule qui frappe l'Angleterre en ce mois d'août 1935, la jeune Briony a trouvé sa vocation : elle sera romancière. Finsi les contes de fées et les mélodrames de l'enfance. Du haut de ses treize ans, elle voit dans le roman un moyen de déchiffrer le monde. Mais lorsqu'elle surprend sa grande sœur Cecilia avec Robbie, fils de domestique, sa réaction naïve aux désirs des adultes va provoquer une tragédie. Trois vies basculent et divergent, pour ne se recroiser que cinq ans plus tard, dans le chaos de la guerre, entre la déroute de Dunkerque et les prémices du Blitz. La brutalité du réel va faire mûrir Briony. Mais est-il encore temps d'expier un crime d'enfance ? Prolongeant une grande tradition anglaise, celle de Lawrence et du Messager, tout en s'interrogeant sur les pouvoirs et les limites du romancier, Ian McEwan restitue, avec une égale maîtrise, les frémissements d'une conscience et les rapports de classes, la splendeur indifférente de la nature et les tourments d'une Histoire aveugle aux individus. Peintre admirable de la fragilité du bonheur et de la douleur du souvenir, il nous livre, avec Expiation, son roman le plus abouti.

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Espionage and love entwine in this "utterly thrilling" (The Globe and Mail), tragic masterpiece from Booker Prize–winner Ian McEwan. “A web of spying, subterfuge, deceit and betrayal. . . . Winningly cunning.”—Sunday Times "One of the most original, compelling works of McEwan's career." —Maclean's Serena Frome, the beautiful mathematician daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge before taking a job with MI5 in London. The year is 1972: Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism; the Cold War has entered a moribund phase but the fight goes on and British Intelligence hesitates at little to influence hearts and minds. MI5 sends Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, on a secret mission that brings her to Tom Healy, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? What is deception and who is deceiving whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage—trust no one. Ian McEwan's mastery is more dazzling than ever in this superb story of intrigue, love...and mutual betrayal.

A twisted relationship between two couples reaches a terrible climax in this novel by the New York Times-bestselling author of Machines Like Me. Colin and Mary are lovers on holiday in Italy, their relationship becoming increasingly problematic as they become increasingly alienated from one and other. They move from place to place in this foreign land but seemingly without aim or purpose, seemingly bored and without attachment. Then they meet a man named Robert and his disabled wife, Caroline. Colin and Mary seem happy for the diversion—happy to meet another couple that takes their focus off of each other for a while. But things become strange when they attempt to leave: Robert and Caroline insist that they stay with them for a while longer. While Mary and Colin do rediscover an erotic attraction to each other during this time, they also find that their relationship with Robert and Caroline is taking a dreadful and horrific turn, in this "fine novel" by the Booker Prize-winning author of Saturday and On Chesil Beach ( New Statesman). "McEwan perfectly captures the thrill of travel when one is divorced from familiar surroundings and the chance of something unusual and out-of-character seems possible. Of course, this being a McEwan fiction, the possibility is a brutal truth about how people find love in extreme ways."— The Daily Beast

Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this novel is the intimate story of the crumbling of a marriage, as witnessed by an outsider—from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Jeremy is the son-in-law of Bernard and June Tremaine, whose union and estrangement began almost simultaneously. Seeking to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences Bernard and June cannot reconcile, Jeremy undertakes writing June's memoirs, only to be led back again and again to one terrifying encouner forty years earlier—a moment that, for June, was as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy's own time. In a finely crafted, compelling examination of evil and grace, Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civiliation's darkest moods—its black dogs—with the tensions that both create love and destroy it. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.

A member of a British-American surveillance team in Cold War Berlin finds himself in too deep in this "wholly entertaining" work (The Wall Street Journal) from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham’s intelligence work—tunneling under a Russian communications center to tap the phone lines to Moscow—offers him a welcome opportunity to begin shedding his own unwanted innocence, even if he is only a bit player in a grim international comedy of errors. His relationship with Maria Eckdorf, an enigmatic and beautiful West Berliner, likewise promises to loosen the bonds of his ordinary life. But the promise turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening—a night when Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A sharp contemporary morality tale, cleverly disguised as a comic novel, Amsterdam is "a dark tour de force, perfectly fashioned" (The New York Times) from the bestselling author of Atonement. On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is a newspaper editor. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences that neither could have foreseen…

From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—a brilliant and compassionate novel of love, faith, and suspense, and of how life can change in an instant. "A remarkable novel, haunting and original and written in prose that anyone who writes can only envy." —The Washington Post The calm, organized life of science writer Joe Rose is shattered when he sees a man die in a freak hot-air balloon accident. A stranger named Jed Parry joins Rose in helping to bring the balloon to safety, but unknown to Rose, something passes between Parry and himself on that day—something that gives birth to an obsession in Parry so powerful that it will test the limits of Rose's beloved rationalism, threaten the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.

From the Booker Prize winning author of Amsterdam, a brilliant new novel. On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis’s cleaning lady, whose education has been subsidized by Cecilia’s and Briony’s father, and who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By day's end, their lives will be changed – irrevocably. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not imagined at its start. And Briony will have witnessed mysteries, seen an unspeakable word, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone… Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of love and war and class and childhood and England, An Atonement is a profound – and profoundly moving – exploration of shame and forgiveness, of atonement and of the possibility of absolution.

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • The bestselling author of Saturday and Atonement brilliantly illuminates the collision of sexual longing, deep-seated fears and romantic fantasy in his unforgettable, emotionally engaging novel. The year is 1962. Florence, the daughter of a successful businessman and an aloof Oxford academic, is a talented violinist. She dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, the earnest young history student she met by chance and who unexpectedly wooed her and won her heart. Edward grew up in the country on the outskirts of Oxford where his father, the headmaster of the local school, struggled to keep the household together and his mother, brain-damaged from an accident, drifted in a world of her own. Edward’s native intelligence, coupled with a longing to experience the excitement and intellectual fervour of the city, had taken him to University College in London. Falling in love with the accomplished, shy and sensitive Florence—and having his affections returned with equal intensity—has utterly changed his life. Their marriage, they believe, will bring them happiness, the confidence and the freedom to fulfill their true destinies. The glowing promise of the future, however, cannot totally mask their worries about the wedding night. Edward, who has had little experience with women, frets about his sexual prowess. Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by conflicting emotions and a fear of the moment she will surrender herself. From the precise and intimate depiction of two young lovers eager to rise above the hurts and confusion of the past, to the touching story of how their unexpressed misunderstandings and fears shape the rest of their lives, On Chesil Beach is an extraordinary novel that brilliantly, movingly shows us how the entire course of a life can be changed—by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

L'Edward i la Florence s'acaben de casar. De fet, s'han casat aquest matí mateix i ara tot just estan sopant a l'hotel on passaran la seva nit de noces, allà, als peus de la platja de Chesil. Som a principis dels anys seixanta i per ells tot és desconegut, tots dos són verges i la nit, com la resta de vida que han promès passar plegats, s'obre davant d'ells plena de misteris, expectatives, pors, inseguretats...Amb l'estil angoixant i detallat a què McEwan ens té avesats, A la platja de Chesil assoleix una tensió dramàtica esplèndida. Construïda a partitr de la contraposició dels pensaments del nuvi i la núvia, dos personatges que s'enfronten a una nova vida, l'obra manté el pols des de la primera línia i fins al final, i deixa el lector amb la sensació que McEwan té un domini extraordinari de l'art d'explicar la vida a partir dels gestos mai fets i les paraules no dites.

Que se passe-t-il lorsque quatre enfants se retrouvent seuls dans une maison isolée et désormais trop vaste pour eux ? Le père avait entrepris de cimenter tout le jardin : il meurt avant d'avoir mené à terme sa tâche. Puis c'est le tour de la mère, dont la disparition fait craindre aux orphelins leur dispersion et l'intrusion des " autres " dans leur existence... C'est avec une originalité étonnante et une maîtrise parfaite que lan McEwan nous relate comment la vie dès lors s'organise. Une malle dans la cave, du ciment, tels sont les expédients que, d'instinct, avec cette logique imposée par les circonstances, les enfants choisissent pour se protéger du monde et de l'autorité des adultes. Un roman captivant.

Stephen Lewis is shopping at the grocery stoer with his three-year old daughter Kate. She disappears without a trace and time as Stephen knows it ceases. Uncertainty and grief overwealm him and his wife as they drift apart until the passage of time--both forgiving and punishing--can bring them back to one another.

A New York Times Bestselling AuthorCall them transcripts of dreams or deadly accurate maps of the tremor zones of the psyche, the seven stories in this collection engage and implicate us in the most fearful ways imaginable.