Wonderful...exquisite...devastating

Exquisitely crafted

Superb... The protagonists have everything to lose, and their faltering journey towards a point of no return is conjured into life my McEwan with irresistible subtlety, tact and force

On Chesil Beach is more than an event. It is a masterpiece

This is McEwan's mature style, one we have come to recognise from Atonement and Saturday. It is a polished, civilised style, and very distant from the shock tactics of his early work... McEwan brings Florence and Edward touchingly alive for us; and their seriousness, their idealism, and their desire for love draw us towards them

To commend an author for being reminiscent of Edith Wharton is a compliment that this reviewer reserves for a select few. Yet with On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan has earnt it

A master feat of concentration in both senses of the word

Written with a fierce pursuit of the truth and an utterly modern self-awareness, what a confidant tour de force this turns out to be

One of our greatest living writers. Many Easter weekends and train journeys will be enlivened by a compelling novella

It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly

A didactic, ironic novella of great accomplishment and calculated ambition. Structurally and linguistically, it is a triumph...intriguingly compassionate

It is a measure of McEwan's artistry that he is able here both to linger in the recording of sensuous particularities and at the same time to deliver the satisfactions of plot we are accustomed to deriving from his fiction

McEwan shares with his fellow English novelist Jim Crace not only an interest in history but in finding a style in prose that is slow-moving, yet compelling, at times stilted and dry, and then suddenly sharp and precise

The protagonists of On Chesil Beach have everything to lose, and their faltering journey towards a point of no return is conjured into life by McEwan with irresistible subtlety, tact and force

The book is steeped in lost hopes and disappointments, with each sentence as powerful as a Larkin poem. I didn't know a British novelist could still be this good

McEwan is word-perfect at handling the awkward comedy of this relationship and, as ever, turning it into something far more disturbing

Two characters so vibrant they step straight off the page

McEwan's brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate discrete moments in life and invest them with incredible significance

McEwan's style is lean and clear...every sentence feels carefully crafted, the words all perfectly in place

A tightly focused human drama... McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous... The bedroom scene itself is carried off brilliantly

A fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowered to devastating effect

McEwan is the kind of author who can say more in a sentence than most can say in a chapter...This is a thoughtful book which provokes thought. But more immediately than that, this is a book which, while managing to be very funny, gives us a wonderful and moving portrait of a specific time, and two of its hostages, and of how to make a mess of love

McEwan conveys the near-numinous significance of a single moment with quiet, almost unbearable grace

A heavenly read

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