Machines Like Me reminds us that McEwan is once-in-a-generation talent, offering readerly pleasure, cerebral incisiveness and an enticing imagination.

[Machines Like Me] is right up there with his very best [novels]. Machines Like Me manages to combine the dark acidity of McEwan’s great early stories with the crowd-pleasing readability of his more recent work. A novel this smart oughtn’t to be such fun, but it is.

Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me is a dazzling account of our interaction with technology… He marries a gripping plot, handled with rarefied skill and dexterity, to a deep excavation of the narrowing gap between the canny and the uncanny, leaving the reader pleasurably dizzied, and marvelling at human existence.

Compelling… unforgettably strange… there are many pleasures and many moments of profound disquiet in this book, which reminds you of its author’s mastery of the underrated craft of storytelling… [Machines Like Me] is morally complex and very disturbing, animated by a spirit of sinister and intelligent mischief that feels unique to its author.

[McEwan's] fierce intelligence [crackles] like a Jumping Jack on Bonfire Night… Arguably the finest English writer of his generation, the ideas he explores are important, now more that ever.

[McEwan is] as mordant a chronicler of the age as we have… Machines Like Me offers as good a primer on the multifarious anxieties that should afflict us all as anything catalogued as “non-fiction”.

Machines like Me displays… impressive richness. Excited by ideas and perceptive about emotions, encompassing cutting-edge science, philosophical speculation and lively social observation, it is funny, thought-provoking and politically acute… In this bravura performance, literary flair and cerebral sizzle winningly combine.

Original, and as always with McEwan’s novels, beautifully written.

McEwan knows all the novelistic rules… [and his] restlessness when it comes to subject matter, even as he enters his seventies, is stunning… [Machines Like Me] shimmer[s] with relevance.

[Machines Like Me] traverses the muddled morality of Artificial Intelligence... This is new and exciting ground for McEwan, one of Britain's most consistently brilliant writers.

In this sublimely playful novel… there isn’t a page that fails to make you think, or make you smile.

Machines Like Me is a sharply intelligent novel of ideas.

Effortlessly brilliant, gripping, funny, touching.

Ian McEwan's latest novel, Machines Like Me, is a topsy-turvy tour de force.

The novel is as honed and well constructed as one would expect from McEwan… a sleek and streamlined work by a master technician.

Ian McEwan has always been a generous writer to his readers, his novels bulging with big ideas and rich story-telling… [it’s] hard not to admire the sheer scale of McEwan’s ambition. Many literary novels claim to be exploring ‘what it is to be human’. Few carry out this exploration as thoroughly, or as literally, as [Machines Like Me] does.

McEwan teases out the ethical dilemmas of this storyline with his customary verve… [Machines Like Me is] effortlessly readable and fizzing with ideas.

McEwan returns with another ambitious, high-concept work... [exploring] some very timely moral dilemmas.

Adam, an eerily ambiguous presence throughout, proves a highly effective conduit for McEwan to channel all sorts of interesting questions concerning sexual consent, the burden of knowledge, the collapse of the borders between public and private and whether humans or machines are better equipped to behave ethically.

Machines Like Me is ultimately about the age-old question of what makes people human. The reader is left baffled and beguiled.

McEwan gives the whole subject of artificial intelligence a thorough and fascinating examination… a rich and thought-provoking read.

Gripping.

In [Machines Like Me], McEwan has taken his creativity into a subversive alternative 1980s London… the young couple at the centre of McEwan’s story find out the danger in inventing things beyond our control.

Machines Like Me feels like a novel about empathy, and the artificial limits we set on it – by race, by gender, by geographical location – so that we can sleep at night in a world of cruelty and horror.

Machines Like Me is deeply intriguing, a little unnerving and quite captivating… [it] will leave you questioning, and imagining how our not too distant future might look.

Ian McEwan is one of our most venerated living writers… [in Machines Like Me] McEwan shrewdly touches upon the intricacies of artificial intelligence.

McEwan’s prose is, as expected, nuanced, thoughtful and beguiling.

It wasn’t going to be long before [McEwan] swooped upon the ethical conundrums of artificial intelligence… Wonderful… [McEwan] pose[s] all sorts of questions about humanity.

Machines Like Me is elegantly constructed, the sentences are consistently lovely, and the character dynamics…compelling.

McEwan knows how to fashion a twisty and pacy narrative, to keep us alive to the possibility that what we’re reading…is not all that it seems.

McEwan muses on love, empathy and the morality and ethics of artificial intelligence… very good.

An important literary contribution to the AI debate, one of the great questions of our time.

Precisely rendered and well observed… [McEwan] neatly delineates humanity’s remorseless self-demotion from the centre of the universe to flotsam.

[An] undeniably another excellent novel from McEwan, who demonstrates that he can conjure up challenging characters, witty dialogue and moral ambiguity when dealing with sex robots just as brilliantly as he does on literary turf.

Dexterous, utterly gripping and intensely thought-provoking.

Deeply unnerving… What starts out as a darkly funny ménage à trois becomes an unsettling examination of the human condition. Bold, clever.

The latest novel from my favourite author tackles the subjects of artificial intelligence and what it is to be human. He does this in a surprising, original way, and Adam, the strong, seductive “robot”, is a character that will haunt me for a long time.

[This] new, gripping, beautifully written and constructed, disturbing, and provocative novel…is a thrilling read… the chilling conclusions that hyper-rationalism can come to are brilliantly described.

McEwan maintains his status as a master of fiction.

A new collection of stories that explores the complex - and often darkly funny - connections between gender, sex, and power across genres.

Ian McEwan’s sublimely playful new novel transports you back to the Eighties but with some major changes, including eerily life-like robots… Dark and slyly funny, it’ll also give your brain a workout.

Not only does he pull it off, he does so triumphantly, in the cleverest book I’ve read this year. It’s smart, dark and at times very funny.

A saucy, claustrophobic and darkly funny story which is all rather peculiar. Compulsive reading.

I devoured Ian McEwan’s latest very funny spin on Hamlet.

An ingenious rewrite of Hamlet as a murder story in which a foetus is detective and possible victim.

This is McEwan at his most playfully provocative.

A clever conceit, elegantly wrought, economically constructed.

A bewitching ode to humanity’s beauty, longing and selfishness.

A gripping piece of fiction.

I was hooked from the first page.

[A] smart, eloquent novel.

A enthralling read from one of the world’s master storytellers.

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