Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means - literature, travel, friendship, drugs, politics, sex and love.

Twenty-five years later, as the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe, Roland’s wife mysteriously vanishes and he is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence and look for answers in his family history.įrom the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Covid pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history but more often struggles against it. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. While the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines’s life is turned upside down. ‘McEwan is one of the most accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose’ New York Times ‘The supreme novelist of his generation’ Sunday Times My favourite example is Enduring Love, where a hot air balloon accident. Lessons is an intimate yet universal story of love, regret and a restless search for answers. His particular skill as an author is in taking an event and stretching it into a novel. Rate this book Lessons Ian McEwan 4.05 10,427 ratings1,658 reviews When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. A richly observed story that spans decades to recount lives of sometimes-noisy desperation. It is the story of a man’s life, but it is also the story of a man making his life into a story. True, but McEwan’s imagination delivers plenty of family secrets and reflects on so many lessons unlearned in a world that’s clearly wobbling off its axis. But for so many of us, old wounds run deep. Lessons is Ian McEwan’s most autobiographical novel to date. The mesmerising new novel from Ian McEwan, the bestselling author of Atonement.

Epic, mesmerising and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times – a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one ordinary man Readers of Ian McEwan have by now learned to approach his fiction with their guards up.

Lessons ian mcewan reviews