The Children Act

by Ian McEwan Narrated by Lindsay Duncan

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Fiona Maye is a renowned, fiercely intelligent High Court Judge whose professional success contradicts her rapidly crumbling marriage. When her husband’s sudden departure leaves her questioning the life she’s built for herself, she throws herself into the case of a teen boy whose parents are refusing a life-saving medical treatment due to their religious beliefs. This truly heart-wrenching and powerful novel is not your typical courtroom drama, but a deeply sensitive and compelling character driven story you won’t want to miss.

A brilliant, emotionally wrenching new novel from the author of Atonement and Amsterdam Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child's welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts. But Fiona's professional success belies domestic strife. Her husband, Jack, asks her to consider an open marriage and, after an argument, moves out of their house. His departure leaves her adrift, wondering whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability; whether it was not contempt and ostracism she really fears. She decides to throw herself into her work, especially a complex case involving a seventeen-year-old boy whose parents will not permit a lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with their beliefs as Jehovah's Witnesses. But Jack doesn't leave her thoughts, and the pressure to resolve the case-as well as her crumbling marriage-tests Fiona in ways that will keep readers thoroughly enthralled until the last stunning page.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, BookRiot

“Fantastically pleasurable.... Anything we want a novelist to do, he can do.... Unsurpassable.” —Chicago Tribune

“A svelte novel as crisp and spotless as a priest’s collar.... Another notable volume from one of the finest writers alive.” —The Washington Post

“Masterful.... Begins with the briskness of a legal brief written by a brilliant mind, and concludes with a gracefulness found in the work of few other writers.” —Meg Wolitzer, NPR

“Powerful.... Convincingly presents a complex woman in all her nuances.... A paragon becomes all too human in this aching tale.” —New York Daily News

“The first thing to do about Ian McEwan is stipulate his mastery. Anything we want a novelist to do, he can do, has done. His books are fantastically pleasurable. Their plots click forward, the characters lifted into real being by his gliding, edgeless, observant, devastating prose—his faultless prose.... Every novelistic mode is at his command, from the dark fabulism of The Child in Time to the vibrant sweep of Atonement to the modest but beautiful realism of his more recent work, On Chesil Beach, Saturday, Solar.” —Chicago Tribune

“Highly subtle and page-turningly dramatic.... Only a master could manage, in barely over 200 pages, to engage so many ideas, leaving nothing neatly answered.” —The Boston Globe

“It’s a joy to welcome The Children Act.... [The novel’s] sense of life-and-death urgency never wavers.... Profound.... You would have to go back to Saturday or Atonement to find scenes of equivalent intensity and emotional investment.” —The Wall Street Journal

“McEwan here crafts a taut morality tale in crystalline sentences.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“A quietly exhilarating book.... Reveals an uncanny genius for plucking a resonant subject from the pages of lifestyle journalism and teasing it out into full scenes and then pressing them hard for their larger, enduring meanings.” —Los Angeles Times

“Powerful.... Heartbreaking and profound.... Skillfully juxtaposes the dilemmas of ordinary life and tabloid-ready controversy.” —People

“Smart and elegant.... Reminds us just how messy life can be and how the justice system, despite the best of intentions and the best of minds, doesn’t always deliver justice.” —USA Today

“A finely written, engaging read.... Poignant, challenging, and lyrical.” —The Huffington Post

“Haunting.... [A] brief but substantial addition to the author’s oeuvre.” —Entertainment Weekly, A-

“One of the most extraordinary, powerful, moving reading experiences of my life.... An utterly remarkable novel, delicately balanced, perfectly crafted, beautifully written.” —Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading

“Captivating.... Achingly romantic.... Entertain[s] some messy dualities: the limits of the law and the expansiveness of humanity, youth and age, guilt and innocence, the confines of religion and the boundlessness of free thought.” —The Houston Chronicle

“Fascinatingly complex and finally heartbreaking.... A quite beautiful work of fiction.” —The Times (London)

“Masterly.... As one begins an Ian McEwan novel—this is his 13th—one feels an immediate pleasure in returning to prose of uncommon clarity, unshowiness and control.... The best novel he has written since On Chesil Beach.” —The Guardian (London)

“As ever, McEwan achieves the rich, fine-grained realistic texture that makes his novels, sentence by sentence, a pleasure to read.” —The London Review of Books

“Swift and compelling, asking to be read in a single sitting.... So skillfully composed and fluently performed, it’s a pleasure from start to finish, one not to be interrupted.’ —Evening Standard (London)

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2014-07-23
In the late summer of 2012, a British judge faces a complex case while dealing with her husband's infidelity in this thoughtful, well-wrought novel. Fiona Maye, at 59, has just learned of an awful crack in her marriage when she must rule on the opposing medical and religious interests surrounding a 17-year-old boy who will likely die without blood transfusions. The cancer patient, weeks shy of the age when he could speak for himself, has embraced his parents' deep faith as Jehovah's Witnesses and their abhorrence of letting what the Bible deems a pollutant enter his body. The scenes before the bench and at the boy's hospital bedside are taut and intelligent, like the best courtroom dramas. The ruling produces two intriguing twists that, among other things, suggest a telling allusion to James Joyce's 17-year-old Michael Furey in "The Dead." Meanwhile, McEwan (Sweet Tooth, 2012, etc.), in a rich character study that begs for a James Ivory film, shows Fiona reckoning with the doubt, depression and temporary triumphs of the betrayed—like an almost Elizabethan digression on changing the locks of their flat—not to mention guilt at stressing over her career and forgoing children. As Fiona thinks of a case: "All this sorrow had common themes, there was a human sameness to it, but it continued to fascinate her." Also running through the book is a musical theme, literal and verbal, in which Fiona escapes the legal world and "the subdued drama of her half-life with Jack" to play solo and in duets. McEwan, always a smart, engaging writer, here takes more than one familiar situation and creates at every turn something new and emotionally rewarding in a way he hasn't done so well since On Chesil Beach (2007).

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170963959
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	09/09/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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Excerpted from "The Children Act"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Ian McEwan.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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