Nutshell
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4.1 • 63 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
**Sunday Times Number One Bestseller**
A classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world's best storytellers - 'a masterpiece' The Times
Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home - a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse - but not with John. 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.
'An astonishing act of literary ventriloquism unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master...' Daily Telegraph
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A woman plots to kill her husband with the help of her lover. We’ve read stories like this before, but never from the perspective Ian McEwan takes. The action in Nutshell is entirely narrated by the unborn foetus in the woman’s womb, who’s privy to all the deceit and treachery being plotted around it. It’s a gimmick that could be disastrous in less capable hands, but McEwan is a virtuoso. The baby’s musings on life outside the womb are as entertaining as the edge-of-your-seat murder plot…which gives a knowing wink to Hamlet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McEwan's latest novel is short, smart, and narrated by an unborn baby. The narrator describes himself upside down in his mother's womb, arms crossed, doing slow motion somersaults, almost full-term, wondering about the future. His mother listens to the radio, audiobooks, and podcasts, so just from listening he has acquired knowledge of current events, music, literature, and history. From experience, he's formed opinions about wine and human behavior. What he's learned of the world has him using his umbilical cord as worry beads, but his greatest concern comes from overhearing his mother and her lover plotting to kill his father. The mother, Trudy, is separated from John, the father. John is overweight, suffers from psoriasis, and, perhaps most annoying for Trudy, loves to recite poetry. Trudy's lover, Claude, is a libidinous real estate developer who covets both John's wife and their highly marketable London home. Claude also happens to be John's brother. Echoes of Hamlet resound in the plans for fratricide, a ghost, and the baby's contemplation of shuffling off his mortal coil. The murder plot structures the novel as a crime caper, McEwan-style that is, laced with linguistic legerdemain, cultural references, and insights into human ingenuity and pettiness. 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. 150,000-copy announced first printing.
Customer Reviews
In a nutshell
Author
British. Won the Booker for 'Amsterdam' (1998), which I don’t consider his best. Multiple other nominations. 'Atonement’ (2001) was made into a successful film. As writers go, McEwan is all class. Not only that, he never wastes words, which means his novels are generally quite short as is the case here.
Plot
Trudy is pregnant but estranged from the father and her spouse John: an apparently airy-fairy poet and academic scholar of poetry. She still lives in the family home: a run-down but extremely valuable London townhouse in a trendy area which has been in John’s family for some time. Warming her bed is John’s dodgy property developer brother Claude, who's got his hands on Trudy and wants to get them on the townhouse too. The two lovers conspire to kill John and make it look like suicide. Trudy will then get the house and Bob’s your uncle, or rather Claude is. Nothing new in that plot line you might say. Shakespeare dreamed it up many moons ago. The trick here is that the narrator is Trudy’s unborn child, sloshing about in utero listening to all the nefarious goings-on and desperate to save his real father. Yep, this is a retelling of 'Hamlet' from within the womb, which I for one think is extremely clever.
Writing
Mr McEwan’s skill with words means the implausibility of a highly literate and remarkably philosophical foetus doesn’t matter.
Bottom line
Simply brilliant: a masterpiece even.