The Child in Time - by Ian McEwan (Paperback)

About the Book

With extraordinary insight and tenderness, this 1987 Whitbread Award-winning novel takes readers into the dark territory of a marriage devastated by the loss of a child.

Book Synopsis

With extraordinary tenderness and insight, the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement takes us into the dark territory of a marriage devastated by the loss of a child.

Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, is confronted with the unthinkable: his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. In one horrifying moment that replays itself over the years that follow, Stephen realizes his daughter is gone.

Kate's absence sets Stephen and his wife, Julie, on diverging paths as they each struggle with a grief that only seems to intensify with the passage of time. Eloquent and passionate, the novel concludes in a triumphant scene of love and hope that gives full rein to the author's remarkable gifts. The Child in Time is an astonishing novel by one of the finest writers of his generation.

Don't miss Ian McEwan's new novel, Lessons.

Review Quotes

Whitbread Prize Winner

"A death-defying story, inventive, eventful, and affirmative without being sentimental." --Time

"Luminous, haunting, restrained ... cuts to the core of human existence." --Chicago Tribune

"Resonates with psychological reality: the beautifully layered relationships, the tracing of the many-layered love between father and child, husband and wife.... As artfully conceived as it is poignantly realized." --The New York Times Book Review

"A great pleasure to read.... McEwan writes as if Dickens, Lawrence, and Woolf were in his bones.... Funny and unsentimentally passionate." --The Wall Street Journal

About the Author

IAN MCEWAN is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen 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; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.