Amsterdam - Hardcover

McEwan, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385494238 ISBN 13: 9780385494236

Publisher: Doubleday, 1999

Synopsis

The critically acclaimed author of Enduring Love lends a comic twist to a contemporary morality tale involving two eminent Englishmen who make a pact over the grave of a mutual lover, with disastrous consequences. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

When good-time, fortysomething Molly Lane dies of an unspecified degenerative illness, her many friends and numerous lovers are led to think about their own mortality. Vernon Halliday, editor of the up-market newspaper The Judge, persuades his old friend Clive Linley, a self-indulgent composer of some reputation, to enter into a euthanasia pact with him. Should either of them succumb to such an illness, the other will effect his death. From this point onwards we are in little doubt as to the novel's outcome--it's only a matter of who will kill whom. In the meantime, compromising photographs of Molly's most distinguished lover, foreign secretary Julian Garmony, have found their way into the hands of the press, and as rumours circulate he teeters on the edge of disgrace. However, this is McEwan, so it is no surprise to find that the rather unsavoury Garmony comes out on top. McEwan is master of the writer's craft, and while this is the sort of novel that wins prizes, his characters remain curiously soulless amidst the twists and turns of plot. --Lisa Jardine

Review:

"A psychologically brilliant study of heartlessness" (Sunday Telegraph)

"Amsterdam is brilliantly engineered and marvellously entertaining" (Evening Standard)

"Full of gusto, straightforward and delivers blows to the gut..shocking" (A.S. Byatt Literary Review)

"The novel twists and turns unexpectedly... McEwan has a master's control over his instrument" (Sunday Times)

"A psychologically brilliant study of heartlessness...superbly done...gripping" (Sunday Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0385494238
• ISBN 13: 9780385494236
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 193