Most Popular Books 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.

A classic from one of our greatest storytellers underlines Doubleday Canada’s commitment to YA fiction, in a handsome new edition that will appeal to young readers of all ages. In these seven exquisite, interlinked episodes, grown-up Peter Fortune reveals the secret journeys, metamorphoses, and adventures of his childhood. Living somewhere between dream and reality, Peter experiences fantastical transformations: he swaps bodies with the family cat and a cranky infant, battles a very bad doll who comes to life to seek revenge, and discovers in a kitchen drawer some vanishing cream that actually makes people vanish. In the final story, he wakes up as an eleven-year-old inside a grown-up’s body, and embarks on the truly fantastic adventure of falling in love. Moving, dreamlike, and extraordinary, The Daydreamer is a celebration of imagination and fantasy.

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.

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.

Somerset Maugham Award winner: Dark early fiction by the author of Nutshell—"A splendid magician of fear" ( The Village Voice Literary Supplement). Taut, brooding, and densely atmospheric, the stories here show us how murder can arise out of boredom, perversity from adolescent curiosity—and how sheer evil can become the solution to unbearable loneliness. These short fiction pieces from the early career of the New York Times–bestselling and Man Booker Prize–winning author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach are claustrophobic tales of childhood, twisted psychology, and disjointed family life as terrifying as anything by Stephen King—and finely crafted with a lyricism and an intensity that compels us to confront our secret kinship with what repels us. "A powerful talent that is both weird and wonderful." — The Boston Sunday Globe "Ian McEwan''s fictional world combin[es] the bleak, dreamlike quality of de Chirico''s city-scapes with the strange eroticism of canvases by Balthus. Menace lies crouched between the lines of his neat, angular prose, and weird, grisly things occur in his books with nearly casual aplomb." — The New York Times

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement follows an ordinary man through a Saturday whose high promise gradually turns nightmarish in this “dazzling [and] powerful” novel (The New York Times). Henry Perowne—a neurosurgeon, urbane, privileged, deeply in love with his wife and grown-up children—plans to play a game of squash, visit his elderly mother, and cook dinner for his family. But after a minor traffic accident leads to an unsettling confrontation, Perowne must set aside his plans and summon a strength greater than he knew he had in order to preserve the life that is dear to him.

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

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.

#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 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.

A child''s abduction sends a father reeling in this Whitbread Award-winning novel that explores time and loss with "narrative daring and imaginative genius" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children''s books, is on a routine trip to the supermarket with his three-year-old daughter. In a brief moment of distraction, she suddenly vanishes—and is irretrievably lost. From that moment, Lewis spirals into bereavement that effects his marriage, his psyche, and his relationship with time itself: "It was a wonder that there could be so much movement, so much purpose, all the time. He himself had none at all." In The Child in Time, acclaimed author Ian McEwan "sets a story of domestic horror against a disorienting exploration in time" producing "a work of remarkable intellectual and political sophistication" that has been adapted into a PBS Masterpiece movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review). "A beautifully rendered, very disturbing novel." — Publishers Weekly

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.

#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.

Orphaned siblings create a macabre secret world for themselves in this "irresistibly readable" novel by the New York Times-bestselling author ( The New York Review of Books). This "powerful and disconcerting" novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Children Act and Atonement ( The Daily Telegraph) tells the story of a dying family who live in a dying part of the city. A father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents'' deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, who is entering adolescence with all of its attendant curiosity and appetites. Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well—until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions. "[A] beautiful but disturbing novel."— The AV Club "McEwan''s evocative detail and perfect British prose lend a genteel decorum to the death and decay that surround the family."— The New Yorker

Darkly brilliant short fiction by the New York Times-bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Machines Like Me and Atonement. A two-timing pornographer becomes the unwilling object in the fantasies of one of his victims. A jaded millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress and plunges into a hell of jealousy and despair. Over the course of a weekend, a guilt-ridden father with his teenage daughter discovers the depths of his own blundering innocence. Whether these are the written transcripts of dreams or deadly accurate maps of the tremor zones of our psyche, all seven stories in this collection implicate us in the most fearful ways imaginable. "His stories are complex and his prose, like Orwell''s, is as clear as windowpane... McEwan''s comic edge gives these stories a moral force. They are not meant simply to shock and horrify middle-class readers. Rather, like all good satire, they seek to unmask hypocrisy and cruelty."— The Washington Post Book World

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…