Our foremost storyteller returns with an audacious new novel, Machines Like Me.
**Number One Sunday Times Bestseller**
In a world not quite like this one, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing has achieved an astonishing breakthrough in artificial intelligence.
In an alternative 1980s London, Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality.
This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – and soon a love triangle forms, which leads Charlie, Miranda and Adam to a profound moral dilemma. What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine truly understand the human heart?
Provocative and thrilling, Machines Like Me warns of the power to invent things beyond our control.
‘Funny, thought-provoking and politically acute… In this bravura performance, literary flair and cerebral sizzle winningly combine’
Sunday Times
About the Author
Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; and Nutshell, which was a Number One bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.
Industry Reviews
Machines Like Me reminds us that McEwan is once-in-a-generation talent, offering readerly pleasure, cerebral incisiveness and an enticing imagination. -- Lara Feigel * Spectator *
[Machines Like Me] is right up there with his very best [novels]. Machines Like Me manages to combine the dark acidity of McEwan's great early stories with the crowd-pleasing readability of his more recent work. A novel this smart oughtn't to be such fun, but it is. -- Alex Preston * Observer *
Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me is a dazzling account of our interaction with technology... He marries a gripping plot, handled with rarefied skill and dexterity, to a deep excavation of the narrowing gap between the canny and the uncanny, leaving the reader pleasurably dizzied, and marvelling at human existence. -- Philip Womack * Independent *
Compelling... unforgettably strange... there are many pleasures and many moments of profound disquiet in this book, which reminds you of its author's mastery of the underrated craft of storytelling... [Machines Like Me] is morally complex and very disturbing, animated by a spirit of sinister and intelligent mischief that feels unique to its author. -- Marcel Theroux * Guardian *
[McEwan's] fierce intelligence [crackles] like a Jumping Jack on Bonfire Night... Arguably the finest English writer of his generation, the ideas he explores are important, now more that ever. -- Richard Dismore * Daily Express *
