Sweet Tooth
A Novel
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4.1 • 71 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
Espionage and love entwine in this "utterly thrilling" (The Globe and Mail), tragic masterpiece from Booker Prize–winner Ian McEwan.
“A web of spying, subterfuge, deceit and betrayal. . . . Winningly cunning.”—Sunday Times
"One of the most original, compelling works of McEwan's career." —Maclean's
Serena Frome, the beautiful mathematician daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge before taking a job with MI5 in London. The year is 1972: Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism; the Cold War has entered a moribund phase but the fight goes on and British Intelligence hesitates at little to influence hearts and minds. MI5 sends Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, on a secret mission that brings her to Tom Healy, 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? What is deception and who is deceiving whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage—trust no one. Ian McEwan's mastery is more dazzling than ever in this superb story of intrigue, love...and mutual betrayal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McEwan goes for laughs in this cold war spoof in which Serena Frome, one time math whiz, struggles through Cambridge and graduates in 1972 with an embarrassing third. For reasons never satisfactorily explained, a professor and former MI5 operative recruits her as a spy. Serena's soon in love, not for the last time in the story, no matter that he's 54, long married and sickly, or that she's 21, gorgeous, and in a relationship. She's a voracious reader, and her familiarity with contemporary fiction earns her an assignment to persuade a writer with anti-Soviet leanings to abandon academia and write full-time, supported by funding whose source he can never know. Espionage fans won't find much that's credible, and fans of political farce might be surprised by a narrative less focused on lampooning MI5 than on mocking (mostly female) readers. Given the nonstop wisecracks, the book might be most satisfying if read as sheer camp. A twist confirms that the misogyny isn't to be taken seriously, but Serena's intellectual inferiority is a joke that takes too long to reach its punch line. McEwan devotees may hope that in his next novel he returns to characterizations deeper than the paper they're printed on.
Customer Reviews
Wonderful
I am a fan of all of Ian McEwan's books, but this is possibly my favorite (or at least one of my favorites, along with Atonement and Amsterdam). I wasn't sure what to expect, and it took patience to let the character build gradually over the course of the book - but the result is brilliant (don't want to give anything away). I hope this gets made into a good movie.
Brilliant
Outstanding, well written pager turner. Never wanted it to end.