The Children Act

Ian McEwan

Sep 2014 · Recorded Books · Narrated by Lindsay Duncan

About this audiobook

A brilliant, emotionally wrenching new novel from the author of Atonement and Amsterdam Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child's welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts. But Fiona's professional success belies domestic strife. Her husband, Jack, asks her to consider an open marriage and, after an argument, moves out of their house. His departure leaves her adrift, wondering whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability; whether it was not contempt and ostracism she really fears. She decides to throw herself into her work, especially a complex case involving a seventeen-year-old boy whose parents will not permit a lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with their beliefs as Jehovah's Witnesses. But Jack doesn't leave her thoughts, and the pressure to resolve the case-as well as her crumbling marriage-tests Fiona in ways that will keep readers thoroughly enthralled until the last stunning page.

About the author

Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot, England on June 21, 1948. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Sussex and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of East Anglia. He writes novels, plays, and collections of short stories including In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Enduring Love, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act and Nutshell. He has won numerous awards including the 1976 Somerset Maugham Award for First Love, Last Rites; the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award and the 1993 Prix Fémina Etranger for The Child in Time; the 1998 Booker Prize for Fiction for Amserdam; the 2002 W. H. Smith Literary Award, the 2003 National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, the 2003 Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel for Atonement; and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Saturday.