Solar

by Ian McEwan
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An engrossing, satirical and very funny new novel on climate change

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Synopsis

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, Solar is a serious and darkly satirical novel, showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time.A story of one man's greed and self-deception, it is a profound and stylish new work from one of the world's great writers.

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Jan 20

Ian McEwan To Be Awarded 2011 Jerusalem Prize

by Random House Australia on 20 January 2011

Ian McEwan To Be Awarded 2011 Jerusalem Prize 0 comments

SOLAR author wins Israel’s highest literary honour for foreign writers

Oct 16

New Ian McEwan

by Random House Australia on 16 October 2009

New Ian McEwan 0 comments

SOLAR is an engrossing and satirical novel which focuses on climate change and will be published on 18 March 2010. This story – of one man’s ambitions and self-deceptions – is a stylish new work by one of the word’s greatest living writers. Michael Beard is in his late fifties; bald, overweight, unprepossessing – a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work...

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Editorial Reviews

"A novel that promises comedy as well as crisis" - Guardian

"McEwan has already aired extracts ... and the warmth, humour and zest of the book were unmistakable" - Sunday Times

"McEwan avoids the problem of how to dramatise and emotive area of science by uncharacteristically and highly effectively deploying a sly streak of comedy." - Claire Allfree, Metro

"Climate-change comedy that's every bit as brilliant as its title suggests" - The Sunday Times

"Solar has an engagingly direct, bleakly comic view of science and scientists. It also convinces." - Times Literary Supplement

"From an early stage, [McEwan's] sumptuously textured language rested on a flair for finely engineered design." - The Independent

"Michael Beard is a comic creation in the same class as Martin Amis's John Self. Indeed, if Money could be seen as the high point of Amis's career, summing up the excesses of the Eighties, so Solar is likely to come to be regarded as the equivalent for McEwan. For this novel takes on the political obsession of our age - climate change - and fashions out of it a satirical masterpiece... McEwan is in many ways the closest thing we have to a national novelist... it will come to be regarded as a classic" - Lorna Bradbury, Daily Telegraph

"Vivacious and sprawling, a beautifully and compellingly written novel...McEwan's achievement is the brilliant creation of a flawed, larger than life character who all but walks off the page to shake your hand." - Ruth Scurr, The Times

"This is an absorbing, accomplished, instructive, and very funny novel bye one of fiction's most fecund minds" - Country Life

"McEwan's reputation as one of Britain's greatest living writers remained safely intact" - Sunday Express

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