Lessonscovers more than seventy years in the life of Roland Baines, a man of
great potential who never seems to amount to much.
Roland isn’t a striver and a
doer; he’s someone to whom things happen. Some of those things are deeply
personal, and some — the Cuban missile crisis, Chornobyl, COVID — happened to
everyone.
McEwan performs this mingling of the micro and the macro with his
usual effortless grace. The great formative experience of Roland’s school days
was a long affair with Miss Cornell, his disturbed piano teacher.
It’s
fascinating to watch him realize that the experience was not, in fact, a horny
adolescent’s fantasy come true but plain abuse and that, in many ways, it
nipped his potential in the bud.
Discover the Sunday Times bestselling new novel from Ian McEwan.
Lessons is an intimate yet universal story of love, regret and a restless search for answers.
When 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. 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.
Twenty-five years later Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes, and he is left alone with their baby son. Her disappearance sparks of journey of…
It’s not easy to make
me root for a fictional couple. I usually find them cloying and hope one of
them falls down a flight of stairs. But when solid, dutiful Newland Archer has
his bow tie set spinning by the unconventional Madame Olenska, I hoped with all
my heart that it would work out.
A perfectly realized vision of upper-class New
York in the late nineteenth century, a suffocating, pinched-up world where you
might as well slit your own throat as pick up the wrong fork.
Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry the beautiful and conventional May Welland, Newland Archer falls in love with her very unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. The consequent drama, set in New York during the 1870s, reveals terrifying chasms under the polished surface of upper-class society as the increasingly fraught Archer struggles with conflicting obligations and desires. The first woman to do so, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this dark comedy of manners which was immediately recognized as one of her greatest achievements.
I didn’t
think Le Carré was for me, somehow – the world of ‘proper’ spies seemed so grim and grey – but I was curious to see why
this novel, in particular, has such a lofty reputation. I saw all right. My god,
it’s good. It’s almost nothing but sad
middle-aged men talking quietly in drab offices and houses, and yet it is unremittingly
gripping. It is the sort of book that makes you feel you’ve
understood a world.
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies.
The man he knew as "Control" is dead, and the young Turks who forced him out now run the Circus. But George Smiley isn't quite ready for retirement-especially when a pretty, would-be defector surfaces with a shocking accusation: a Soviet mole has penetrated the highest level of British Intelligence. Relying only on his wits and a small, loyal cadre, Smiley recognizes the hand of Karla-his Moscow Centre nemesis-and sets a trap to catch the traitor.
The Oscar-nominated feature film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is directed by…
Eugene Duffy is about to turn 70; his son Jim is about
to turn 40.
For decades now, they’ve
been running a little hardware shop in a small Irish town and living together
in good-natured bachelor harmony. But time is marching on, and with thoughts of
old age weighing heavily on his mind, Eugene is growing increasingly concerned
about his son’s future. He
resolves to take on the task of finding him a wife, whether he likes it or not.
But Jim isn’t
the one who needs help. Eugene is. Turning 70 is having a funny effect on him.
And that’s before his
estranged wife shows up out of the blue, bearing news.
