The Child in Time

Ian McEwan · 1987 CE · Novel · English · Contemporary

A writer of children's books takes his three-year-old daughter to the supermarket on a Saturday morning, turns to the checkout and finds the space beside him empty. Two years on he still sits on a government childcare committee, his marriage has gone quiet in separate houses, and a friend from publishing has begun dressing as a schoolboy. Winner of the Whitbread Novel Award, it folds a physicist's time into a book about grief — an afternoon outside a country pub opens a window onto his own parents before his birth.

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