Machines Like Me
Machines Like Me

Author: Ian McEwan

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0385545126

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From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—”a sharply intelligent novel of ideas” (The New York Times) that asks whether a machine can understand the human heart, or whether we are the ones who lack understanding. Set in an uncanny alternative 1982 London—where Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence—Machines Like Me powerfully portrays two lovers who will be tested beyond their understanding. 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 generation of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he codesigns Adam's personality. The near-perfect human that emerges is beautiful, strong, and smart—and a love triangle soon forms. Ian McEwan's subversive, gripping novel poses fundamental questions: What makes us human—our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns against the power to invent things beyond our control. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, coming in September!

Machines Like Me
Machines Like Me

Author: Ian McEwan

Publisher: Knopf Canada

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0735278202

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The new novel from the master storyteller is his best in years. Brilliantly McEwan, richly entertaining, a moving love story and a mystery--yet for all its gripping plotline one of the most morally layered novels written for our times, as it carries us into a provocatively real alternative history and the profound challenges of Artificial Intelligence. Set in 1980s London, the story revolves around Charlie: young and reckless, and in love with his upstairs neighbour, the enchanting Miranda whose hidden, murky past hangs between them. He has spent his inheritance on the acquisition of one of twenty-five highly developed new robotic humans--named Adam or Eve, each one beautiful, strong and clever--developed by Alan Turing after his success on the legendary WW2 Enigma codebreaking machine. As London is consumed by the huge protests over England and Argentina's Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher's jingoistic ambitions, Charlie courts Miranda, and his Adam finds himself, inevitably, central to their affair. Great novelist that he is, McEwan pulls us into the question of what it means to love, what makes us human in our fast-changing times, what might follow if a machine understands too well the human heart, and how precarious a construct is the world we live in and think we know.

Lessons
Lessons

Author: Ian McEwan

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 0593535219

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NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From the best-selling author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Vogue • The New Yorker “Masterful.... McEwan is a storyteller at the peak of his powers…. One of the joys of the novel is the way it weaves history into Roland’s biography…. The pleasure in reading this novel is letting it wash over you.” —Associated Press When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life. Haunted by lost opportunities, Roland seeks solace through every possible means—music, literature, friends, sex, politics, and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without causing damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past? Epic, mesmerizing, and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times—a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man's lifetime.

The Innocent
The Innocent

Author: Ian McEwan

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2010-12-22

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0307761029

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A member of a British-American surveillance team in Cold War Berlin finds himself in too deep in this "wholly entertaining" work (The Wall Street Journal) from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham’s intelligence work—tunneling under a Russian communications center to tap the phone lines to Moscow—offers him a welcome opportunity to begin shedding his own unwanted innocence, even if he is only a bit player in a grim international comedy of errors. His relationship with Maria Eckdorf, an enigmatic and beautiful West Berliner, likewise promises to loosen the bonds of his ordinary life. But the promise turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening—a night when Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.

Victor LaValle's Destroyer #1
Victor LaValle's Destroyer #1

Author: Victor LaValle

Publisher: Boom! Studios

Published: 2017-05-24

Total Pages: 31

ISBN-13: 1613988168

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When the last descendant of the Frankenstein family loses her only son to a police shooting, she turns to science for her own justice...putting her on a crash course with her family's original monster and his quest to eliminate humanity. An intense, unflinching story exploring the legacies of love, loss, and vengeance placed firmly in the tense atmosphere and current events of the modern-day United States.

The Cockroach
The Cockroach

Author: Ian McEwan

Publisher: Knopf Canada

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 70

ISBN-13: 0735280487

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A brilliant, of-the-moment political satire like no other, from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Kafka meets the world of Brexit in this bitingly funny novel centered on a cockroach transformed into the prime minister of England. That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a giant creature. Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain--and it is his mission to carry out the will of the people. Nothing must get in his way; not the opposition, nor the dissenters within his own party. Not even the rules of parliamentary democracy. In this bitingly funny Kafkaesque satire, Ian McEwan engages with scabrous humor a very recognizable political world and turns it on its head. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.

Machines in the Head
Machines in the Head

Author: Anna Kavan

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2020-02-18

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1681374153

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Enter the strange and haunting world of Anna Kavan, author of mind-bending stories that blend science fiction and the author's own harrowing experiences with drug addiction, in this new collection of her best short stories. Anna Kavan is one of the great originals of twentieth-century fiction, comparable to Leonora Carrington and Jean Rhys, a writer whose stories explored the inner world of her imagination and plumbed the depths of her long addiction to heroin. This new selection of Kavan’s stories gathers the best work from across the many decades of her career, including oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and institutionalization from Asylum Piece (1940), moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958), and stories of addiction from Julia and the Bazooka (1970). Kavan’s turn to science fiction in her final novel, Ice, is reflected in her late stories, while “Starting a Career,” about a mercenary dealer of state secrets, is published here for the first time. Kavan experimented throughout her writing career with results that are moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling, always unique. Machines in the Head offers American readers the first full overview of the work of a fearless and dazzling literary explorer.

Enduring Love
Enduring Love

Author: Ian McEwan

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2010-07-20

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0307366995

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In one of the most striking opening scenes ever written, a bizarre ballooning accident and a chance meeting give birth to an obsession so powerful that an ordinary man is driven to the brink of madness and murder by another's delusions. Ian McEwan brings us an unforgettable story—dark, gripping, and brilliantly crafted—of how life can change in an instant.

Black Dogs
Black Dogs

Author: Ian McEwan

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2010-07-20

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 0307367002

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Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Black Dogs is the intimate story of the crumbling of Bernard and June Tremaine’s marriage, as witnessed by their son-in-law, Jeremy, who seeks to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences that seem irreconcilable. In writing June’s memoirs, Jeremy is led back to a moment, that was, for June, as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy’s own time. Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civilization’s darkest moods—its black dogs—with the tensions that both create love and destroy it.

Murmur
Murmur

Author: Will Eaves

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9781786899378

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Winner of the 2019 Wellcome Book PrizeWinner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness PrizeShortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths PrizeShortlisted for the 2019 James Tait Black PrizeLonglisted for the 2019 Rathbones Folio PrizeTaking its cue from the arrest and legally enforced chemical castration of the mathematician Alan Turing, Murmur is the account of a man who responds to intolerable physical and mental stress with love, honour and a rigorous, unsentimental curiosity about the ways in which we perceive ourselves and the world.Formally audacious, daring in its intellectual inquiry and unwaveringly humane, Will Eaves's Murmur is a rare achievement.