Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize 2010.

Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 25 March 2010.

On Chesil Beach was the last offering from McEwan and although beautifully formed it was a novella rather than a good chunky novel so it’s been four years since we could sink our teeth into a McEwan novel and we certainly haven’t been disappointed. Great characters, great plot and the wonderful observations on human frailty that McEwan makes so well.

The Good Housekeeping view...

April 2010 Good Housekeeping selection.

Ian McEwan’s new novel Solar, which sees flawed prize-winning physicist Michael Beard discover a way to combat climate change, while the rest of his life falls apart. Both the author and his books divide opinion, but with Amsterdam, Atonement and On Chesil Beach, he has become one of Britain’s biggest literary names.

Synopsis

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, Solar is a serious and darkly satirical novel, showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time. A story of one man's greed and self-deception, it is a profound and stylish new work from one of the world's great writers.

About the Author

Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. 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 and Saturday. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation