Winner of such prestigious honors as the Booker Prize and Whitbread Award, Ian McEwan is justifiably regarded as a modern master. Set in 1972, Sweet Tooth follows Cambridge student Serena Frome, whose intelligence and beauty land her a job with England's intelligence agency, MI5. In an attempt to monitor writers' politics, MI5 tasks Serena with infiltrating the literary circle of author Tom Healy. But soon matters of trust and identity subvert the operation.
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“One of McEwan’sfinest female characters, Serena Frome…is both clever and beautiful, aspeed-reading lit geek and a math whiz, a 1970s version of the Harvard MBAtypes who launch life-changing Internet startups…What unfolds is a mystery, aromance, and a dazzling display of literary workmanship. Though the actionslows to a crawl at times, McEwan is a brilliant and entertaining storyteller whoselines—sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes wickedly wise—had me reachingfor my highlighter.”
— Amazon.com, editorial review
“This is a great big beautiful Russian doll of a novel, and its construction—deft, tight, exhilaratingly immaculate—is a huge part of its pleasure…Sweet Tooth is a comic novel and a novel of ideas, but, unlike so many of those, it also exerts a keen emotional pull.”
— Observer (London)“Sweet Tooth takes the expectations and tropes of the Cold War thriller and ratchets up the suspense…A well-crafted pleasure to read, its smooth prose and slippery intelligence sliding down like cream.”
— Independent (London)“A wisecracking thriller hightailing between love and betrayal, with serious counter-espionage credentials thrown in…This is ultimately a book about writing, wordplay, and knowingness.”
— Telegraph (London)“Thoroughly clever…A sublime novel about novels, about writing them and reading them and the spying that goes on in doing both…McEwan has spied on real life to write Sweet Tooth, and in reading it we are invited to spy on him…Rich and enjoyable.”
— Financial Times“A disgraced spy, a failed mission, a ruined lover: Ian McEwan’s new novel, Sweet Tooth, opens at full tilt…The novel’s pleasures are multiple and, as always with McEwan, they begin with the storytelling.”
— Bloomberg Businessweek“McEwan’s most stylish and personal book to date…The year’s most intensely enjoyable novel.”
— Daily Beast“Gloriously readable and, at times, wickedly funny.”
— Irish Times“McEwan writes with his usual clinical precision, brilliantly evoking the London of dingy Camden flats, the three-day week, and IRA atrocities. His assumption of a female persona is pitch-perfect.”
— Daily Mail (London)“McEwan fans won’t be disappointed by Sweet Tooth, and newcomers to the author will be meeting him at the top of his game.”
— Globe and Mail“A subtly and sweetly subversive novel [that is a] masterful manipulation of the relationship(s) between fiction and truth…Britain’s foremost living novelist has written a book as drily funny as it is thoughtful.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Juliet Stevenson has a lovely reading voice with a slight British accent that captures the personality of Serena in this first person narration. She convincingly expresses the ambivalence that is tearing Serena apart.”
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Ian McEwan is the author of more than a dozen books, including either New York Times bestsellers. His novel Amsterdam won the 1998 Book Prize; Atonement, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; and The Child in Time won the Whitbread Award. His story collection, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award.
Juliet Stevenson is a narrator who is recipient of the AudioFile Golden Voice Award. She has won the prestigious Audie Award and numerous Earphones Awards for her narrations. She is a British actress on stage and screen and notably a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has also appeared in popular films such as Bend It Like Beckham and Mona Lisa Smile. She was honored as a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. She received further recognition when she was nominated for several BAFTA Awards, and she earned an Olivier Award for her role in Death and the Maiden.