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  • Published: 1 May 2013
  • ISBN: 9780099578789
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $22.99

Sweet Tooth




Re-jacketed in a stunning new series style for 2023, Sweet Tooth is a story of love and espionage in 1970s Britain from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling Ian McEwan.

'A web of spying, subterfuge, deceit and betrayal... Acute, witty...winningly cunning' Sunday Times

The year is 1972, the Cold War is far from over and Serena Frome, in her final year at Cambridge, is being groomed for MI5. Sent on Operation Sweet Tooth - a highly secret undercover mission - she meets Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage - trust no one.

  • Published: 1 May 2013
  • ISBN: 9780099578789
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Ian McEwan

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; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Also by Ian McEwan

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Praise for Sweet Tooth

Enthralling, beguiling and totally addictive from the first page to the last… McEwan’s sense of time and place is authentic with his trademark attention to details of the social history of the period

Bristol Magazine

A brilliant portrayal of 1970s Britain at its absolute worst… But it's also a gripping spy novel with some characteristic McEwan twists toward the end

Mail on Sunday

Riveting... Delicious... Gripping

Guardian

Highly entertaining

John Lanchester, Guardian Books of the Year

A web of spying, subterfuge, deceit and betrayal... Acute, witty...winningly cunning

Sunday Times

Gloriously readable and, at times, wickedly funny

Irish Times

Sublime...impressive...rich and enjoyable

Financial Times

A brilliant portrayal of 1970s Britain at its absolute worst… But it's also a gripping spy novel with some characteristic McEwan twists toward the end

Mail on Sunday

Sweet Tooth takes the expectations and tropes of the Cold War thriller and ratchets up the suspense, while turning it into something else... A well-crafted pleasure to read, its smooth prose and slippery intelligence sliding down like cream

Independent

Playful, comic... This is a great big Russian doll of a novel, and in its construction – deft, tight, exhilaratingly immaculate – is a huge part of its pleasure...exerts a keen emotional pull

Observer

McEwan’s mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty story of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self

GQ

Fans of Ian McEwan should rejoice with the arrival of this novel... An extraordinary, irresistible work of fiction

Sunday Business Post

One of the most hotly anticipated novels of the year...it's brilliant

Sunday Business Post

I loved it. It reminded me of his most successful novel, Atonement

Harpers Bazaar Online

Ian McEwan proves he’s still the master penman with his twelfth novel

Grazia

Enthralling, beguiling and totally addictive from the first page to the last… McEwan’s sense of time and place is authentic with his trademark attention to details of the social history of the period

Bristol Magazine

McEwan’s prose is controlled, his observation forensic as ever... McEwan carries us with irresistible momentum to a surprise ending

Maggie Ferguson, Intelligent Life

Gripping

Evening Standard ES Magazine

Full of ideas

Claire Allfree, Metro

Dazzling

Essentials

Fans of Ian McEwan should rejoice with this arrival of this novel, because Sweet Tooth is McEwan's finest work since 2001's Atonement

Kevin Power, Sunday Business Post

Given McEwan’s ability to make riveting fiction out of English politics (not easy), it would be hard to imagine anyone better equipped to write such a story... Delicious... Gripping

James Lasdun, Guardian

His assumption of a female persona is pitch-perfect

Michael Arditti, Daily Mail