Sweet Tooth
Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan’s mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty audiobook of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self.
Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency. The Cold War has entered a moribund phase, but the fight goes on, especially in the cultural sphere.
Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is sent on a ‘secret mission’ which brings her into the literary world of Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage – trust no one.
The Sweet Tooth audiobook is beautifully narrated by Juliet Stevenson.
Product Details
About Ian McEwan
Reviews for Sweet Tooth
Guardian Books of the Year
Gloriously readable and, at times, wickedly funny
Irish Times
Sweet Tooth takes the expectations and tropes of the Cold War thriller and ratchets up the suspense, while turning it into something else... A well-crafted pleasure to read, its smooth prose and slippery intelligence sliding down like cream
Independent
Sublime...impressive...rich and enjoyable
Financial Times
Riveting... Delicious... Gripping
Guardian
A brilliant portrayal of 1970s Britain at its absolute worst… But it's also a gripping spy novel with some characteristic McEwan twists toward the end
Mail on Sunday
A web of spying, subterfuge, deceit and betrayal... Acute, witty...winningly cunning
Sunday Times
Playful, comic... This is a great big Russian doll of a novel, and in its construction – deft, tight, exhilaratingly immaculate – is a huge part of its pleasure...exerts a keen emotional pull
Observer
McEwan’s mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty story of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self
GQ
Fans of Ian McEwan should rejoice with the arrival of this novel... An extraordinary, irresistible work of fiction
Sunday Business Post