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Our foremost storyteller returns with an audacious new novel, Machines Like Me

About the Author

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; and Nutshell, which was a Number One bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Reviews

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

[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.
*Observer*

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.
*Independent*

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.
*Guardian*

[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.
*Daily Express*

[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”.
*GQ*

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.
*Sunday Times*

Original, and as always with McEwan’s novels, beautifully written.
*Independent, *Summer Reads of 2019**

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.
*Financial Times*

[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.
*Harper's Bazaar, *The Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2019**