Machines Like Me: From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Lessons

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Our foremost storyteller returns with an audacious new novel, Machines Like Me. **Number One Sunday Times Bestseller** 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. Can you design the perfect partner What makes us human Our outward deeds or our inner lives Provocative and moving, Machines Like Me explores whether a machine can ever truly understand the human heart. 'Funny, thought-provoking and politically acute...' Sunday Times 'Dazzling' Guardian 'An unsettling examination of the human condition. Bold, clever' Sunday Telegraph

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 McEwans great early stories with the crowd-pleasing readability of his more recent work. A novel this smart oughtnt to be such fun, but it is. -- Alex Preston * Observer *
Ian McEwans 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 authors 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 *

Author Bio

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.