The Heartwrenching Court Cases That Inspired My New Novel

Author Ian McEwan on the complicated family court cases that served as inspiration for his new novel.

Author: Ian McEwan
Published: Sep 5, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,309 words)

Hand on the Shoulder

[Fiction] Excerpt from McEwan’s forthcoming novel Sweet Tooth. A young woman is introduced to the man who would recruit her to MI5:

“My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service. In the early spring of 1972, when exams were only weeks away, I found a new boyfriend, a historian called Jeremy Mott. He was of a certain old-fashioned type—lanky, large-nosed, with an out-sized Adam’s apple. He was unkempt, clever in an understated way, and extremely polite. I’d noticed quite a few of his sort around. They all seemed to have descended from a single family and to have come from private schools in the North of England where they were issued with the same clothes.”

Author: Ian McEwan
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 23, 2012
Length: 30 minutes (7,730 words)