The Child in Time [Paperback]

Soon to be on public television starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, is confronted with the unthinkable: his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. In one horrifying moment that replays itself over the years that follow, Stephen realizes his daughter is gone.

With extraordinary tenderness and insight, Booker Prize–winning author Ian McEwan takes us into the dark territory of a marriage devastated by the loss of a child. Kate's absence sets Stephen and his wife, Julie, on diverging paths as they each struggle with a grief that only seems to intensify with the passage of time. Eloquent and passionate, the novel concludes in a triumphant scene of love and hope that gives full rein to the author's remarkable gifts. The winner of the Whitbread Prize,The Child in Timeis an astonishing novel by one of the finest writers of his generation.

A death-defying story, inventive, eventful, and affirmative without being sentimental. —Time

Luminous, haunting, restrained . . . cuts to the core of human existence. —Chicago Tribune

Resonates with psychological reality: the beautifully layered relationships, the tracing of the many-layered love between father and child, husband and wife. . . . As artfully conceived as it is poignantly realized. —The New York Times Book Review

A great pleasure to read. . . . McEwan writes as if Dickens, Lawrence, and Woolf were in his bones. . . . Funny and unsentimentally passionate. —The Wall Street Journal