Nutshell

** Sunday Times Number One Bestseller**

A classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s best storytellers – ‘a masterpiece’ The Times

Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home – a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse – but not with John.

An astonishing act of literary ventriloquism unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master… Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a shocking tale of murder and treachery from one of the world’s master storytellers .

A creative gamble that pays off brilliantly… Witty and gently tragic, this short, bewitching novel is an ode to humanity’s beauty, selfishness and inextinguishable longing.

Ian McEwan’s embryonic spin on Hamlet is a virtuoso feat of wordplay … Virtuoso entertainment.

While the literary device of an unborn baby narrating a novel from the womb is hardly original… Ian McEwan employs it with aplomb... Here everything is tightly controlled and the tension ratchets up as our all-knowing unborn watches helplessly from his watery sack while the dastardly plan progresses through a series of nail-biting moments… The ending is beautifully contrived… The book is elegantly written with plenty of pungent, topical observations upon the world.

At once playful and deadly serious, delightful and frustrating it is one of McEwan’s hardest to categorise works, and all the more interesting for it.

Nutshell is an orb, a Venetian glass paperweight, of a book; a place where, be warned , it puts you in the quoting mood… it is a consciously late, deliberately elegiac , masterpiece , a calling together of everything McEwan has learned and knows about his art.

A very alternative Hamlet… the tension ratchets up as our all-knowing unborn watches helplessly from his watery sack while the dastardly plan progresses through a series of nail-biting moments… The book is elegantly written with plenty of pungent, topical observations upon the world its narrator will soon be emerging into.

One of the most hilariously unlikely narrators in contemporary fiction.

A fast, arch beach read… A psychological thriller with a bad marriage and murder at its centre… McEwan has thrown in Gone Girl intrigue with The Girl on the Train suspense and given us his take on how toxic a marriage can get when spliced with a Shakespearean cast. Who knew McEwan could mix high and low literary genres to create such a bizarrely readable mash-up?

The book’s finest exploration is of poetry. The author offers up everything he knows about its intensity, and why he loves it so. It is clear Mr McEwan has had enormous fun writing Nutshell ; now it is the reader’s turn to be entertained too. Dark as it is, this novel is a thing of joy.

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of nineteen novels and two short story collections. 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 ; Nutshell ; Machines Like Me ; and Lessons . Atonement , Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.