In the Pillars of Hercules pub, and other literati haunts in London (to which McEwan moved in his 20s and had “the time of my life, a spring in my step”), he made lifelong friends among the up-and-coming generation of Martin Amis (seen here in cameo), Julian Barnes, and Christopher Hitchens-the novel’s dedicatee. Its locations include the rural Suffolk of his schoolboy years Brighton, seaside setting for his first love at the plate-glass Sussex University (where he devoured Kafka and Thomas Mann, Philip Roth and Updike) and Norwich, where he became the first creative writing graduate of the University of East Anglia. Harking back to a time when croissants and cappuccino were novelties in English cafes, and the Booker prize (won by McEwan’s Amsterdam in 1998) was “newfangled”, Sweet Tooth also traces the geography of the author’s own life. Saturdaiy (2005) unfolded during Iraq war protests in London, while Solar (2010) was a morbid satire on climate change. Like Atonement (2001), the masterpiece that sold 4 million copies and became a 2007 film, this is a historical novel of the kind McEwan alternates with contemporary issues. Yet she falls for Tom Haley, the young writer she covertly funds, in a playful spy novel about passion, duplicity and fiction’s myriad disguises. Code-named Sweet Tooth, her operation backs intellectuals who lean to the “right” side ideologically in the cultural Cold War. Serena Frome (“rhymes with Plume”) is an Anglican bishop’s daughter and Cambridge student recruited as a British intelligence agent in the early 1970s by her older lover, a history professor. For it to work, for them not to be cynical, there has to be freedom for individuals and a social contract.”įreedom, and the sometimes dubious means used to safeguard it, are at the heart of his 15th book of fiction, Sweet Tooth.

“I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress. Pancras station, its neo-gothic architecture an echo of his virtuoso early fiction. “I felt a ballooning sense of love for this city-any city,” McEwan tells me over a latte in the Renaissance hotel at St. Instead, many hands helped the youth to his feet in a moment that touched a witness still basking in London’s Olympic afterglow.

Sweet tooth ian