He's also a delivery system for the author's existential ruminations. Roland is likable and directionless, a part-time pianist, part-time tennis instructor with a string of failed relationships. Expansive and unhurried, 'Lessons' explores how one man's life is shaped by the unpredictable sweep of history. Rather, this workaday Englishman is the central figure in a thought-provoking, occasionally plodding character study penned by Ian McEwan, the esteemed British author. This could be the setup for a rousing Cold War thriller, but our man in West Germany isn't a spy.

Carrying contraband, he'll soon pass through a militarized checkpoint that splits the city in two.

His journey raises important questions.It's the 1970s and Roland Baines, still wounded by an illicit relationship that triggered a lasting identity crisis, approaches the Berlin Wall. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means - literature, travel, friendship, drugs, politics, sex and love. Twenty-five years later, as the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe, Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes and he is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence and look for answers in his family history.įrom the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Covid pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history but more often struggles against it. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. While the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. ' Lessons triumphantly achieves its primary aim of conveying the 'commonplace and wondrous' intertwining of global history and everyday life' Daily Telegraph A wonderful author has delivered another mesmerising, memorable novel' Independent McEwan's best novel in 20 years' New Statesman

'Lessons is deep and wide, ambitious and humble, wise and substantial. Lessons is an intimate yet universal story of love, regret and a restless search for answers. But for so many of us, old wounds run deep. The mesmerising new novel from Ian McEwan, the bestselling author of Atonement. Epic, mesmerising and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times - a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one ordinary man

Lessons by ian mcewan review