First Love, Last Rites

Ian McEwan · 1975 CE · Short Story · English · Contemporary

Eight early pieces of adolescent narrators in south-east England: a boy who engineers his own deflowering with his younger sister, a husband who finds in his great-grandfather's diaries a geometrical formula for making a person disappear, a drifter who follows a child along a canal. The voices are flat, curious and entirely without alarm at what they describe. The Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 fixed McEwan's early reputation as Ian Macabre.

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