Nutshell

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER From one of our greatest living novelists: a breathtakingly inventive modern retelling of Hamlet, one that plays on the classic tale by placing the anguished son in a position where he can observe and endlessly expound on the family tragedy unfolding before him--but not act on what he knows. "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. She's still in the marital home--a valuable old London townhouse--but she has kicked John out. In his place is her lover, John's own brother, the profoundly banal Claude. The illicit couple have hatched a murderous plan 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 the tragic end that his mother and his uncle have planned for his hapless father, 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 is the bestselling author of sixteen books, including the novels The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil Beach; Saturday;Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both short-listed for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets.

Review :
"A peculiar and philosophical novel that features what is perhaps the most ingenious literary conceit of the year." --The Globe and Mail "Until the exciting day when McEwan . . . is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, his numerous and ardent fans enjoy the regular appearance of his highly intelligent and compellingly provocative novels. McEwan can be counted on to make the implausible plausible and the outrageous reasonable, and his talent in that regard is put to its consummate test in [Nutshell]. Startling at first but quickly acceptable and even embraced, this mesmerizing tale is narrated by an unborn, male fetus. . . . [H]e takes matters into his tiny little hands, which brings this ingenious tour de force to its stunning conclusion. As soon as words gets out, any new novel by this bestselling, Booker Prize-winning novelist causes a reader frenzy." --Booklist (starred review) "Everyone . . . should read Ian McEwan's Nutshell. . . . McEwan's command of language is just gobsmacking, even in his sixties; the wonder is that he is hilarious as well. He makes aging look brilliant." --Ian Brown, author of Sixty, The Globe and Mail "[S]hort, smart, and narrated by an unborn baby. . . . 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." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "[S]mart, funny and utterly captivating. . . . [A] small tour de force that showcases all of Mr. McEwan's narrative gifts of precision, authority and control, plus a new, Tom Stoppard-like delight in the sly gymnastics that words can be perform. . . . Mr. McEwan writes here with such assurance and élan that the reader never for a moment questions his sleight of hand." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "At once playful and deadly serious, delightful and frustrating, it is one of McEwan's hardest-to-categorise works, and all the more interesting for it." --The Times "Nutshell is a joy: unexpected, self-aware and pleasantly dense with plays on Shakespeare. It isn't Hamlet, and doesn't particularly illuminate Hamlet, but dances beautifully with it." --NPR "[C]aptivating. . . . [F]ormidable genius. . . . Is there another writer alive who can pull off a narrative line of this sort? . . . The literary acrobatics required to bring such a narrator-in-the-womb to life would be reason enough to admire this novel. . . . The pleasures of this tautly plotted book require no required reading." --The New York Times Book Review "[C]lassic story of murder and revenge, told in an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master." --The Guardian