-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
New from the bestselling author of Atonement and The Children Act.
Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home - a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse - but John's not there. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.
Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world's master storytellers.
"Starred Review. Packed with humor and tinged with suspense, this gem resembles a sonnet the narrator recalls hearing his father recite: brief, dense, bitter, suggestive of unrequited and unmanageable longing, surprising, and surprisingly affecting." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. The unborn baby boy is determined to interfere with how the situation plays out. But how? For all intents and purposes, he is trapped. Nevertheless, he takes matters into his tiny little hands, which brings this ingenious tour de force to its stunning conclusion." - Booklist
"Starred Review. McEwan joins Eric D. Goodman (Womb: A Novel in Utero) and Emma Donoghue (Room) in penning an expansive meditation on stability and identity from a confined perspective." - Library Journal
"Clever, likable, and yet unsatisfying, this tale too often bears out the narrator's early claim: 'I take in everything, even the trivia - of which there is much.'" - Kirkus
"...McEwan makes the story over into a brutally effective howdunnit, magnificently strong on the details of murder: the hats, gloves and waxed fingertips of it, the intimate workings of poison. Once the deed is done, he turns it into an even more effective will-be-they-be-dun-for-it, one that does not give up its secrets until the last page." - The Guardian, Kate Clanchy
This information about Nutshell was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ian McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). Atonement was also made into an Oscar-winning film.
In 2006, Ian McEwan won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Ian McEwan's Website
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
