About this item
"Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space - were it not that I have bad dreams." - Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2 Trudy has been unfaithful to her husband, John. What's more, she has kicked him out of their marital home, a valuable old London town house, and in his place is his own brother, the profoundly banal Claude. The illicit couple have hatched a scheme to rid themselves of her inconvenient husband forever. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb. As Trudy's unborn son listens, bound within her body, to his mother and his uncle's murderous plans, he gives us a truly new perspective on our world, seen from the confines of his. McEwan's brilliant recasting of Shakespeare lends new weight to the age-old question of Hamlet's hesitation, and is a tour de force of storytelling.
About the Author
Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories ; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for ; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for in 1998. His novel 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) . He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel and his novel was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year. McEwan lives in London.
