The Cement Garden
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  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409090052
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160

The Cement Garden

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Jul 2010
Audiobook
13 Nov 2014
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Re-jacketed in a stunning new series style for 2023, this is the first novel from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling Ian McEwan

In the arid summer heat, four children – Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom – find themselves abruptly orphaned. All the routines of childhood are cast aside as the children adapt to a now parentless world. Alone in the house together, the children’s lives twist into something unrecognisable as the outside begins to bear down on them.
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409090052
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
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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.

portrait photo of Ian McEwan

Also by Ian McEwan

Atonement
Lessons
Machines Like Me
Amsterdam
What We Can Know
Penguin Readers Level 7: The Children Act (ELT Graded Reader)
Science
See all

Praise for The Cement Garden

A macabre but unforgettable tale

John Boyne, Guardian

A macabre but unforgettable tale

John Boyne, Guardian

Darkly impressive

The Times

Marvellously creates the atmosphere of youngsters given that instant adulthood they all crave, where the ordinary takes on a mysterious glow

Sunday Times

An extremely assured, technically adept and compelling piece of work

Observer

A shocking book...irresistibly readable

New York Review of Books

It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable

Sunday Times

A superb achievement: his prose has instant, lucid beauty and his narrative voice has a perfect poise and certainty. His account of deprivation and survival is marvellously sure, and the imaginative alignment of his story is exactly right

Tom Paulin

An unforgettable tale

John Boyne, Guardian

Hypnotic

John Updike, New Yorker

One of his very best… Deliciously disturbing.

Conor O'Callaghan, Big Issue in the North
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