Lessons is easily McEwan's most accomplished novel since Atonement... he offers intelligent reflection on his novel's evergreen themes.

I loved Lessons... Deep, life-affirming and A-grade storytelling.

Thoughtful, tender and both universal and timeless in its depiction of the follies of the human heart... Ian McEwan is a masterful storyteller who weaves destiny and self-determination, the past and the future, youth and age, and above all, the loss and memory of love.

Captures youthful lust and late-age regret with equal power.

Superb... another mesmerising, memorable novel.

Irresistible and a joy to read.

McEwan's writing is as elegant and ideas-packed as ever.

Elegant and moving, it's his best work in 20 years.

McEwan returns with his best work since the Booker- and NBCC-winning Atonement...Throughout, McEwan poignantly shows how the characters contend with major historical moments while dealing with the ravages of daily life, which is what makes this so affecting. He also employs lyrical but pared-down prose to great effect . . . Once more, the masterly McEwan delights.

McEwan deftly explores the interplay of will and chance, time and memory.

Lessons should have made the Booker longlist (and shortlist) but no matter. It marks a significant new phase in McEwan's already astonishingly productive career - and may well be remembered as one of the finest humanist novels of its age.

Magnificent and moving, Lessons is up there with McEwan's greatest works.

The Booker-winning author has woven multiple versions of himself into Lessons, his 500-page masterpiece.

Superb... A wonderful author has delivered another mesmerising, memorable novel.

A tour de force of breadth... McEwan writes with invigorating alertness about social and political shifts over the past 70 years.

McEwan's prose always goes down like a cool drink, and its content is often trenchant...I'm delighted to have added this thoughtful, touching and historically grounded novel to my bookshelf.

A moving and masterful work that captures the essence of McEwan....The book's psychological astuteness and elegant prose, is a thrill to behold.

Compassionate and gentle, and so bereft of cynicism it feels almost radical....

Lessons has the wonderful freshness that comes when an author tries something new - along with McEwan's customary wit, insight and compassion.

McEwan's deft, descriptive prose charts the complexity of growing up and finding one's place in an ever-shifting world

[A] big, detailed, sweep of history: starting in the aftermath of World War Two and ending in lockdown. And there's lots going on here other than history too - family drama, tales from boarding school, and a vanishing wife

An expansive novel that finds the epic in domestic situations.

One of his most humane and agreeable [novels].

[Lessons is] an epic tale with domesticity at its centre, encompassing a swathes of history, designed to make you think of the impact of events have on you and, in turn, the impact you make on the world.

Roland's journey is not easy, but the dramatic evocation of his struggles and setbacks means readers will follow him every step of the way

A literary feat of undeniable majesty.

Lessons... [is] so beautifully done as to provide abundant proof of why McEwan still occupies that number-one spot.

Lessons is deep and wide, ambitious and humble, wise and substantial. It is, to my mind, McEwan's best novel in 20 years because it is so alert to human texture and complexity... It marks a significant new phase in McEwan's already astonishingly productive career.

McEwan's literary reach is equal to the task of chronicling Roland's full life. The novel moves back and forth in time, shifting confidently from a long ago past to a vivid present, offering sharp dialogue, intense description, soulful meditations.

Lessons spans a long life and recounts each event in details... [McEwan's] skilful writing makes us keen to turn the pages.

McEwan's new novel is a profound demonstration of his remarkable skill. LESSONS progresses in time the way a rising tide takes the beach: a cycle of forward surges and seeping retreats, giving us a clearer and fuller sense of Roland's life. He becomes a kind of Zelig character passing through momentous changes in the late-20th century. Indeed, even more than McEwan's previous novels, LESSONS is a story that so fully embraces its historical context that it calls into question the synthetic timelessness of much contemporary fiction.

Brilliant . . . a beguiling and irresistible read . . . A masterpiece of a novel that is simultaneously about the business of growing up and getting old, and the business of writing fiction. McEwan, an unparalleled master of social realism, performs a remarkable trick: He manages to create an ineffable sense of mystery out of a rather ordinary human life. How does McEwan pull it off? Through the patient accretion of closely observed detail and one beautiful, shimmering sentence after another.

[Lessons] is quietly touching, as is Mr. McEwan's decision to cede his habitual narrative control to more naturalistic forces. Lessons is more formless than previous books . . . It is also wiser and closer to the bone.

Lessons is an achievement of language but also of ambition: A male writer charts, in consummate detail, the interior world of a male protagonist barely able to keep his chin above a tide of social change

A luminous, beautifully written, and gripping book about lives imperfectly lived. McEwan's new novel is ranging, ambitious, teasingly autobiographical, and unsettling in the manner of his best work, a story of monstrous behavior set against major tides of the last 80 years.

Setting the personal dramas of an individual life against the backdrop of great historical events, McEwan asks how we can learn from the past to live in the present with grace.

Masterful . . . McEwan is a storyteller at the peak of his powers and this deserves to be near the top of the 'best books of 2022' list. One of the joys of the novel is the way it weaves history into Roland's biography as well as the lives of other characters in the book.

Richly observed . . . A tale of aspiration, disappointment, and familial dysfunction spread across a vast historic panorama . . . McEwan's imagination delivers plenty of family secrets and reflects on 'so many lessons unlearned' in a world that's clearly wobbling off its axis.

His best book for years.

McEwan is the most elegant of stylists, shaping sentences that make you see the world anew... and is matchless in his skill at elaborating the interior lives of his characters.

McEwan's wry humanity and gentle amusement at his own generation proves irresistible and a joy to read.

A satisfyingly full-bodied return to form... This sprawling, redemptive, thought-provoking novel does not stand by, but wades into the mess of life.

Lessons spans baby-boomer lives, minds and times with vision, insight and dexterity.

McEwan... captures youthful lust and late-age regret with equal power.

Lessons is a terrifically enjoyable account of how personal and political history intersect through the life of Roland Baines.

McEwan's writing is as elegant and ideas-packed as ever.

A tale of dislocation and dissatisfaction, but also of warmth and humour.

As a novel which tells the story of post-war Britain, Lessons is without parallel... a wonderfully soulful and meditative book.

I loved Ian McEwan's blissfully long cradle-to-grave novel Lessons... It is life-affirming, deep and A-grade storytelling.

McEwan's longest and most autobiographical novel is also his most richly enjoyable for many years... the messiness of life reverberate with hard-won emotional truth.

A humane and highly thought-provoking novel

A riveting chronicle of our times

McEwan delights with lyrical prose that is fittingly poetic.

[A] work which both fascinates and disturbs through its unique perspective on a malicious death… Every sentence is a joy to behold, a gift to the reader of delicately considered prose, and thoughtful observations… Alongside its edgy and entertaining narration, and perhaps in part because of it, the novel manages to challenge all preconceptions of the crime genre, upending the whodunit into an extraordinary will-they-do-it… By nature, Nutshell is a novel which perplexes, entertains, and moves the reader in equal turn, all with McEwan’s startling attention to detail, and luxuriant prose style. Read it for its peculiar narrator, read it for the rapidly-changing and intense emotions, or read it just for the thrill of chase as the killing comes to fruition; whatever intrigues you about this novel, just make sure that you do read it – and feel the thrill for yourself.

Brilliantly realised… Any book so bound up in a conceit and in its own verbal fireworks at times runs the risk of being a bit clever-clever. But on the whole we accept in a suspension of disbelief the foetus’s pompous mastery of language and imagery and abandon ourselves to the sheer eloquent pleasure of this hilarious romp.

Short, odd but pleasurable… Great fun, and very well written.

Rich in Shakespearean allusion, this is McEwan on dazzling form.

Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

Ian McEwan’s brilliance as a stylist and surprise plotter finds a fitting subject in Nutshell…, which is Hamlet as told from inside the womb. Up there with his best.

A gripping tale is told with breathtaking skill, turbocharged with rage against the madness and despair of our modern world.

Nutshell is one of those books you sit down to read and don’t get up until you’ve finished. It is brilliantly executed and full of surprises; original, clever and witty. Simply a must-read

A book I couldn’t put down… brilliantly clever