The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and West, between past and present; comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team.
Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life -- and to lose his unwanted innocence.
The promise of his new life begins to be fulfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team, while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex by Maria, a beautiful young German woman. It is a promise that turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening -- a night when Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.
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About the Author:
IAN MCEWAN is the bestselling author of 14 books, including the novels The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar; On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets. He lives in England.
Review:
"A topical and brutal tour de force that somehow ascends from horror to a promise of goodness and grace." Michael Ondaatje
"Pure literary pleasure . . . . it's McEwan's fascination with the inner sources of cruelty and conquest that gives The Innocent its frightening vitality." LA Weekly
"Deft, taut fiction. . . . Many English writers have been compared to Evelyn Waugh, often wrongly, but this book can stand with the master's best." TIME
"Never less than wholly entertaining." The Wall Street Journal
"Powerful and disturbing . . . a tour de force." The New York Times
"Impeccably constructed. . . . Though its plot rivals any thriller in narrative tension, this novel is also a character study--of a young man coming of age in bizarre circumstances." Publishers Weekly
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherVintage Canada
- Publication date2014
- ISBN 10 0345809653
- ISBN 13 9780345809650
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages240
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Rating