Psychological thriller set in Berlin during the Cold War, based on an actual (but little known) incident which tells of the secret tunnel under the Soviet sector which the British and Americans built in 1954 to gain access to the Russians' communication system. The protagonist, Leonard Marnham, is a 25-year-old, naive, unsophisticated English post office technician who is astonished and alarmed to find himself involved in a top-secret operation. At the same time that he loses his political innocence, Leonard experiences his sexual initiation in a clandestine affair with a German divorcee five years his senior. As his two secret worlds come together, events develop into a gruesome nightmare, building to a searing, unforgettable scene of surrealist intensity in which Leonard and his lover try to conceal evidence of a murder. Acting to save himself from a prison sentence, Leonard desperately performs an act of espionage whose ironic consequences resonate down the years to a twister of an ending. Though its plot rivals any thriller in narrative tension, this novel is also a character study of a young man coming of age in bizarre circumstances, and of differences in national character: the gentlemanly Brits, all decorum and civility; the brash, impatient Americans; the cynical Germans. McEwan's neat, tensile prose raises this book to the highest level of the genre.
McEwan was born in Aldershot in England and spent much of his childhood in the East Asia, Germany and North Africa where his father, an officer in the army, was posted. He was educated at the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia, where he was the first graduate of Malcolm Bradbury's pioneering creative writing course.
McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. Among the many litarary prizes are the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories "First Love, Last Rites"; Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for "The Child in Time"; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction three times, winning the award for "Amsterdam" in 1998. His novel "Atonement" received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the "European Novel" (2004). He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The 1997 novel “Enduring Love”, investigating the unsettling relationship between a science journalist and an obsessive stalker, made McEwan a pioneer setting the golden standard for the so-called neuronovel. “Atonement” (2001), turned quickly into an Oscar-winning movie, made him a global celebrity. Both commercially and critically acclaimed, Ian McEwan just won the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, a prize that validates him once again as a contemporary humanist, whose work still challenges the limits of our senses and sensibilities in this forever changing world.
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