The Children Act
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3.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant, emotionally wrenching new novel from the author of Atonement and Amsterdam.
Fiona Maye, a leading High Court judge, renowned for her fierce intelligence and sensitivity is called on to try an urgent case. For religious reasons, a seventeen-year-old boy is refusing the medical treatment that could save his life. Time is running out.
She visits the boy in hospital – an encounter which stirs long-buried feelings in her and powerful new emotions in the boy. But it is Fiona who must ultimately decide whether he lives or dies and her judgement will have momentous consequences for them both.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Rich with psychological insight and piercingly beautiful prose, The Children Act is the story of an esteemed family-court judge whose equilibrium is shattered when her longtime husband asks for an open marriage. Ian McEwan—who won the Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam—has a gift for evoking fear, confusion and other uncomfortably messy emotions. He lasers in on protagonist Fiona Maye’s thoughts as she decides the fate of the embattled young people who come through her courtroom. Anchoring his novel in fascinating details about the law, McEwan also offers intelligent and moving reflections on the complexities of faith and injustice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1989 Children Act made a child's welfare the top priority of English courts easier said than done, given the complexities of modern life and the pervasiveness of human weakness, as Family Court Judge Fiona Maye discovers in McEwan's 13th novel (after Sweet Tooth). Approaching 60, at the peak of her career, Fiona has a reputation for well-written, well-reasoned decisions. She is, in fact, more comfortable with cool judgment than her husband's pleas for passion. While he pursues a 28-year-old statistician, Fiona focuses on casework, especially a hospital petition to overrule two Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse blood transfusions for Adam, their 17-year-old son who's dying of leukemia. Adam agrees with their decision. Fiona visits Adam in the hospital, where she finds him writing poetry and studying violin. Childless Fiona shares a musical moment with the boy, then rules in the hospital's favor. Adam's ensuing rebellion against his parents, break with religion, and passionate devotion to Fiona culminate in a disturbing face-to-face encounter that calls into question what constitutes a child's welfare and who best represents it. As in Atonement, what doesn't happen has the power to destroy; as in Amsterdam, McEwan probes the dread beneath civilized society. In spare prose, he examines cases, people, and situations, to reveal anger, sorrow, shame, impulse, and yearning. He rejects religious dogma that lacks compassion, but scrutinizes secular morality as well. Readers may dispute his most pessimistic inferences, but few will deny McEwan his place among the best of Britain's living novelists.
