Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Child in Time
    The Child in Time
    The Child in Time
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Child in Time

    Written by Ian McEwan

    Narrated by Simon Prebble

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    New York Times best-selling author Ian McEwan is a Booker and Whitbread Prize winner. In this powerful tour de force, two parents come to appreciate the forces of love and time after the disappearance of their daughter, Kate. The Chicago Tribune raves, "Luminous, haunting, restrained...cuts to the core of human existence."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 23, 2008
    ISBN9781436142007
    Author

    Ian McEwan

    Ian McEwan (Aldershot, Reino Unido, 1948) se licenció en Literatura Inglesa en la Universidad de Sussex y es uno de los miembros más destacados de su muy brillante generación. En Anagrama se han publicado sus dos libros de relatos, Primer amor, últimos ritos (Premio Somerset Maugham) y Entre las sábanas, las novelas El placer del viajero, Niños en el tiempo (Premio Whitbread y Premio Fémina), El inocente, Los perros negros, Amor perdurable, Amsterdam (Premio Booker), Expiación (que ha obtenido, entre otros premios, el WH Smith Literary Award, el People’s Booker y el Commonwealth Eurasia), Sábado (Premio James Tait Black), En las nubes, Chesil Beach (National Book Award), Solar (Premio Wodehouse), Operación Dulce, La ley del menor, Cáscara de nuez, Máquinas como yo, La cucaracha y Lecciones y el breve ensayo El espacio de la imaginación. McEwan ha sido galardonado con el Premio Shakespeare. Foto © Maria Teresa Slanzi.

    More audiobooks from Ian Mc Ewan

    Related to The Child in Time

    Related audiobooks

    Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Crimes of the Heart

      Nov 5, 2016

      Like many of his novels, Spanish author Javier Marías’ new book, Thus Bad Begins, isn’t exactly a mystery, though it is mysterious. Here, the 65-year-old perennial Nobel favorite tells the story of Juan de Vere, a young man working for a film directo

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Blue-collar Bard

      Jul 13, 2020

      The Blue-collar Bard
      13 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    • Article

      Opinion: What My Kidney Cancer Is Teaching Me About Serendipity And Persistence

      Dec 19, 2018

      It takes a certain tragic serendipity for cancer to exist, but its persistence is what makes it blossom into a life-threatening illness. Cancer survivors also benefit from serendipity and persistence.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Birnam Wood By Eleanor Catton Review – The Root Of All Evil

      Feb 26, 2023

      In his great critical work The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode wrote about the end-directedness of fiction, the way that novels rehearse and forestall their endings – a process he called peripeteia. One thing he doesn’t discuss in that book is what

      3 min read

    • Article

      Jonathan Franzen’s New Novel ‘Crossroads’ Is Set In The Chicago ‘Burbs And Launches A Trilogy. He Knows You Already Have An Opinion About It.

      Oct 20, 2021

      Jonathan Franzen’s New Novel ‘Crossroads’ Is Set In The Chicago ‘Burbs And Launches A Trilogy. He Knows You Already Have An Opinion About It.
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Bridle

      Oct 10, 2021

      Saliva pooled on her tongue beneath the rusty depressor. She endured a constant urge to swallow, afraid of choking on her own fluids. The taste of metal and blood are so akin, it is easy to mistake one for the other. This early in the day, blood was

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Stackpole Legend

      Mar 1, 2024

      The Stackpole Legend
      13 min read

    • Article

      A Consent (1908)

      Jul 1, 2022

      A Consent (1908)
      19 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 238

      Mar 15, 2018

      The Art of Fiction No. 238
      18 min read

    • Article

      After The Fall

      Oct 15, 2021

      After The Fall
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Flynns’ Effect

      Aug 11, 2019

      The Flynns’ Effect
      7 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Apr 3, 2024

      Books
      16 min read

    • Article

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • Article

      Come the Renaissance

      May 20, 2020

      I’VE escaped from the Abbey. Am I skipping up the drive back to the house, swinging my guitar case and trilling I Have Confidence in Me? Not so much. Bit more Fidelio, if I’m honest: creeping, wan, unshaven, shielding my eyes from the unfamiliar sun.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Fourteen FROM DARK TO LIGHT

      Apr 8, 2020

      Fourteen FROM DARK TO LIGHT
      5 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Jun 1, 2023

      Table Talk
      11 min read

    • Article

      The PEOPLE Of The TRAIL

      Sep 27, 2021

      The PEOPLE Of The TRAIL
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Walk Home

      Mar 29, 2021

      The Walk Home
      10 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Apr 23, 2021

      I’M WRITING this the morning after a sleepless night. I was up thinking of the flames racing across Table Mountain. It had destroyed historic buildings, priceless documents and parts of one of SA’s most famous universities. It also resulted in the in

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Child in Time

    4/5

    31 ratings23 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      I was disappointed in The Child in Time. I am a big McEwan fan but this lacks a compelling story. Not enough plot and too much feelings, is that the right word. McEwan can do great plots but this left me cold. I didn't really care about any of the characters and certainly not about the blasted committee about children's literacy.It started so well, a very dramatic disappearance of his child, but then lost its way I thought.
    • 3/5
      I did not enjoy this book that much; clearly not as good as Atonement or The Innocent; had some supernatural elements which I generally don't like
    • 4/5
      As an author of children's books and expected to be knowledgable about childcare, Stephen Lewis participates by daydreaming through meetings of a government committee tasked with creating an official childcare handbook. At the time he is suffering from cataclysmic despondency following the abduction of his daughter. Each of the chapters open with an excerpt from the handbook, eventually printed without the authority of the committee, a risible document that combines a voguish modernity with Victorian severity. McEwan examines many forms of the child, time, and responsibility: Stephen's desolation for the missing child; the missing time as she grows older; his friend Charles' return to childhood; his concern for a young homeless woman; and his mother's memory of choosing to have a child or termination. McEwan's writing is superb. He is genius at providing the detail that will complete a picture in the mind of the reader. This is a book that will stay in the memory.
    • 2/5
      I never got interested in either the characters or the plot...
    • 4/5
      I don't think this is a book to be read only once. Why: The pace and main settings/characters shift pretty distinctly a couple of times over the course of the novel, and the reader who looks for a linear sort of plot development will be disappointed (if not annoyed). It's not giving anything away to say that a child disappears; that's laid out right on the back cover and happens within the first few pages. So one might expect this to become the driving force behind the plot: who took the kid, where is she, will the parents ever find her again...? But this is less a detective story than a chronicle of how the somewhat miserable main character watches his life fall apart in the kidnapping's aftermath. If I did read the book a second time (possibly this summer) I would watch for whether or not McEwan may have snuck in any subtly cohesive plot devices that I missed on the first read. For instance, I wonder if perhaps he interwove gestures toward different stages of grief (eg Stages of Grief) throughout this meandering, somewhat unconventional plot. A device like that might help me understand why and how McEwan chose to include such vastly different (but not unconnected) characters and scenes: the husband and wife, the parents, the political world, institutionalized school-related settings, a pub lost in time, a treehouse... During a reread, I would also make a list of the overt questions this book raises about childhood and about loss. Some seem grand (as time passes, where does the past go?) and others are more particular (how is it different to lose a child than to lose an old friend?) Can looking at one's parents differently change your own sense of identity? And what role does the state (or rather the wackos who may make up institutional bodies) play in the definition and identity formation of its citizens/subjects/children...? To sum up, The Child in Time was not, for me, as immediately gratifying as Atonement or On Chesil Beach; those two resist gratifying the reader also, in different ways. But I did enjoy it anyway, especially upon getting to the end and trying to figure out how I felt -- same as I did after finishing Atonement and Chesil. The Child in Time just comes off as more experimental, in my opinion, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
    • 5/5
      In what might be Ian McEwan’s least-read, but perhaps best novel, The Child In Time, a children’s book author, Stephen, must come to terms with his three-year old daughter’s abduction and, presumably, her death. Complicating this heart-breaking situation is Stephen’s wife Julie, who has hermited herself away in the countryside, and the fascinating and surreal parallel stories of Stephen’s own childhood, and that of his best friends—his publisher and his wife, a physicist. “The child in time” is not merely a title or a play on words, but also describes the seemingly shifting forces of time and experience itself, and how one child lost in time might shift the timeframe of others. Beautifully concise, perfectly worded, heart-wrenching, subtle, avalanching and, at last, imbued with hope, this is perhaps the work that first marks McEwan’s celebrated later novelistic style (Atonement, Saturday).
    • 5/5
      Absolutely my favourite McEwan. I can't read his latest stuff. It makes me angry with it's smugness. If you don't like his current stuff give this a go, Read and read again. Lot's in there
    • 4/5
      One of my favourite McEwan's. Compelling plot, sympathetic character, innovative style - incredibly carefully & densely written, without being a laborious read at all. And the ending is beautiful, & redemptive, celebrating the simple miracles of humanity. feb 08
    • 5/5
      I first came across this book when taking my English literature A-levels in 1994. It remains one of the few books that I have studied in depth and still totally and utterly adore. It has so many levels. Each time I read it (and I've read it a few times now) it gets better, even though I know exactly what's going to happen. For me, this is novel writing at its best. Prosaic, haunting, real, emotional and with a wry humour. I can accept that this is a polarizing book: people either love or hate it and it is not an easy read. Stick with it, though, and the rewards are great.
    • 4/5
      Another fascinating prism from McEwan. A children's book author grieving a lost child ... a publisher turned politician who regresses to childhood ... a secret from the past, and the torn relationships along the way. There are lots of twists in this reflection on the ephemeralness of childhood, of longing (for a child, for a lost past, for a childhood never experienced) and on how precarious existence itself can be.
    • 4/5
      Even though I had resolved not to read any more McEwans as they all tend to be so cynical, this book sucked me in. And I do not regret that at all, as this book, while as clever and intellectual as all the others, has a softness to it that I liked.
    • 3/5
      Although this book starts with the protagonist's daughter going missing one day whilst they're out shopping, this novel wasn't completely about the aftermath of that, or at least it wasn't the aftermath I was expecting in any case. I didn't entirely get this McEwan novel. Although the loss of their daughter has a huge impact on the parents' marriage, the whole fallout from her disappearance seemed quite quickly dealt with in the prose. Both parents seemed to nearly straightaway give up looking for her and accepted that she was gone forever which I thought was a bizarre and unbelievable reaction in the circumstances.Instead, the book centred much more on the father's position on a government committee tasked with writing a new recommendation on raising children, which I found desperately dull and tedious. There was a segue into a peculiar little sub-plot centred around his friend who had been on the committee before him, but although that at first seemed like a beacon of light and something vaguely interesting in the plot, it somehow seemed pointless and purposeless.I hate to say it given how much I love McEwan, but this novel just didn't work for me. I feel like he disappeared up his own backside in academic / political rhetoric, and I don't get what he was trying to achieve with the novel. There seemed to be different plot themes going on which somehow never pieced together.2.5 stars - harsh, but for me McEwan can do so much better.
    • 4/5
      The overarching theme of this novel is the mutability of time, how it can have no one static definition. As usual, McEwan's crisp, erudite prose makes anything readable. Also like many of his other books - there's one catalyzing event early on and the fallout is depicted. The action that propels this story is the unthinkable - a child abduction. Two years later, the pain is as vibrant as ever for Stephen Lewis. In one chapter, he recalls the day when his normal life ended, through little details. McEwan is exceptionally effective in showing their comfortable home and Stephen's love for his daughter Kate. At the supermarket, he turns his back and she's gone. To his credit, McEwan doesn't solve the mystery of Kate's fate which would be the easy way out. Instead, he depicts Stephen's tenuous relations with the outside world - his estranged wife Julie, his parents, his friend, Tory politician Charles and his duties as a member of a committee on children's reading and writing. The book is unified by Stephen's connections to various characters and a focus on the subtleties of time. While the child in time is overtly Kate, lost in time forever, frozen always as a 3 year old, unable to continue with her father's time, it also refers to Stephen and Charles. Stephen at different times compares the discrepancy between time as it is generally seen - a straight rush onward - and how it is experienced in both personal events and the physics of Charles' wife Thelma. Charles had always been an 'adult', a contrast to Stephen's slightly druggy, uninhibited, lit-major-college days. However, as his life took on more responsibilities, a disturbing fixation firmly places him outside of time. For Stephen, a slightly surreal experience involving his parents freezes him, for a moment, as a child.
    • 5/5
      Excellent book for those who like to read between the lines ... and for those who don't for that matter.
    • 4/5
      Like several McEwan books, this one took a while to hook me, but once the hook happens, it doesn't let go. It's a mesmerizing story, not just about a lost child, but about time itself.
    • 4/5
      I'm reviewing this novel some months after I read it and gave it 3.5 stars and I'm now unsure why I gave it such an average rating. What remains in my memory are not details of the plot but impressions of the scenario in which the novel takes place.That scenario is unremittingly bleak, matching the emotions of two of the main characters, Stephen and Julie, a married coupled who have become estranged following the disappearance and presumed abduction of their daughter, Kate. The novel is set in what, at the time of writing (1987), was a near-future Britain. Although I don't believe the date is ever made explicit, various references suggest it is the late 1990s or early 2000s. Passing reference is made to the Millenium, and an Olympic Games takes place shortly before the events described in the novel.This future is a dystopian view of what Britain might become if the 1980s Conservative administration had been able to pursue some of their ideals to the utmost, combined with an ever-decreasing gross national product. There are licensed beggars instead of Social Security, public infrastructure which is crumbling and unreliable and the sense of an ever-more-intrusive police state.Against this background are described the different ways in which the loss of their child affects Steven, Julie and those around them, and what are almost a set of meditations on childhood, memory, time and changing meaning.McEwan's imagined future now seems somewhat odd. Its dystopian elements are believable even though we now know that thankfully some of them did not come to pass. But echnological change, which sometimes plays a key role in the story, is less well imagined. The protagonists have some kind of home access to remote computers, using something reminiscent of Prestel, but the concept of mobile communications is unknown and a number of plot devices hinge on the difficulty of contacting someone via their home landline when they are themselves mobile.Throughout, Stephen (a children's author) is involved with a cabinet committee producing a government document on childcare and dealing with the increasingly outlandish behaviour of his friend Charles, a government minister.The elements are intermixed well, each reinforcing or complementating the other and underlying it all the bleakness of the tragedy which defines the characters' lives. It's not an uplifting read much of the time, although the bureaucracy of government brings odd moments of humour, and the end is most definitely positive in a way that's unexpected.
    • 4/5
      An intriguing story that was a quick read. The main character, an accidental children's author, in a short period of time losses, in different fashions his daughter, his wife, and a close friend who had had a great influence on the course of his life. As a result, he is left alone with his thoughts and a minor role in a government commission of child rearing. Like all McEwan, it straddles the fine line between unbelievable (or rather bordering on a cynical mysticism) and genuine surprise.
    • 4/5
      Every parent's nightmare dealt with suprisingly deftly by McEwan, who sometimes has a tendency to become playfully melodramatic. But here the inevitable break of the marriage and the falling apart of personality and the slow dulling of time are all expertly recorded. A poignant and sad book reflecting on the relationship of effect and causality.
    • 4/5
      The Child in Time really grabs you at the outset. McEwan’s layered description of every parent’s worst nightmare, a child abduction, is brilliant. I also loved the parts of this book which had the husband and wife dealing with loss in their own ways, and their evolving relationship.I was less of a fan of some of the other elements, which included implied time travel that allowed the husband to get a glimpse of his own parents at a critical moment in his inception, his role on a government committee writing a book on child-rearing (and the conspiracy therein), and his friend’s strange regression into childish behavior. While there are of course ties to childhood with each of these things, they caused the book to meander and lose focus (for me anyway), and unfortunately, as they represent a good hunk of the book, it was heading for a slightly lower rating for awhile there. However, the ending pulled it up, and I do have to recognize McEwan’s skill as a writer. He did hold my interest and respect throughout. This was McEwan’s third novel, written in 1987. Does it hold up? Absolutely. The book jabs at Margaret Thatcher and the conservative government of the time, as well as (briefly) warns against nuclear Armageddon because of the arms race, which was of heightened concern at the time, but it’s not dated in any way. It’s not my favorite book by the man, but it’s not his worst either, and it’s probably worth a read.Quotes:On a child’s perspective, and living in the now:“The wood, this spider rotating on its thread, this beetle lumbering over blades of grass, would be all, the moment would be everything. He needed her good influence, her lessons in celebrating the specific, how to fill the present and be filled by it to the point where identity faded to nothing. He was always partly somewhere else, never quite paying attention, never wholly serious. Wasn’t that Nietzsche’s idea of true maturity, to attain the seriousness of a child at play?”On men and women:“Such faith in endless mutability, in remaking yourself as you came to understand more or changed your version, he had come to see as an aspect of her femininity. Where once he had believed, or thought he ought to believe, that men and women were, beyond all the obvious physical differences, essentially the same, he now suspected that one of their many distinguishing features was precisely their attitudes to change. Past a certain age, men froze into place; they tended to believe that, even in adversity, they were somehow at one with their fates. They were who they thought they were.”
    • 3/5
      Personally I found The Child In Time a depressing read dealing as it does with the after effects of the unsolved case of a child abducted from a grocery store while she and her father were waiting in line to pay. The book starts two years after this event, but this is the shadow that hangs over Stephen ‘s life. His child gone, his marriage shattered, his career as a writer stalled, and his psyche totally caught up in the tragedy. I found my heart going out to this man as he first throws himself into the search for his daughter, then works on theories as to why she was taken, he feels that he should continue to buy birthday gifts for her as an ‘act of faith’ that someday she will be returned. Eventually when he mistakes a little girl for his daughter he realizes he needs to move on to other things so he sets himself a routine of tennis, instruction in Arabic and trying to write again but it really seems as if his time is mostly spent mindlessly watching television and daydreaming.Through his daydreams and musings over his life, we learn of his own childhood, the courtship of his parents, his relationship with his wife, and the slipping into madness of his friend and former publisher all of which adds to Stephen’s own confusion and precarious mental state. The author uses this stream-of-consciousness in other scenes as well to build on the theme of childhood and the loss of innocence.If the author’s objective was to leave his readers feeling uncomfortable, sad and disturbed then this beautifully written story is a great success. This was my first book by Ian McEwan and I can see that he is a brilliant writer but the subject matter of The Child in Time was too disheartening for me at this time.
    • 5/5
      Possibly the best book by McE, though it's not well known. Slight, but very dense, and quite difficult and hard to read especially given its upsetting theme of a lost child. But it's brilliant.
    • 3/5
      This was a difficult novel to rate. McEwan does a good job getting inside the psyche of his characters, but the overall tone of the boo was depressing and there was never any real buildup to anything. The story takes the reader through the mental health issues of multiple characters, but you never really learn to love - or for me even sympathize - with any of them. I think McEwan is an outstanding writer, but this novel just didn't do it for me. I rated three instead of two stars because of the writing.
    • 4/5
      All in all I liked this, with reservations. You can always rely on Ian McEwan for top quality writing though his endings have often been a bit suspect. I actually thought this ended well – despite relying on the sort of plot device soap opera scriptwriters imbibe with their mother’s milk – and though the conclusion was perhaps forehead-slappingly obvious, I didn’t see it coming.Concerning Stephen, a successful author whose only child was kidnapped several years ago and never found, the book avoids the temptation to become overly sentimental, instead concentrating on the long term effects on the child’s parents, who have had to somehow go on with life in the face of this tragedy. Intellectual in tone, it somehow manages to marry up this storyline with a bit of political intrigue: even the Prime Minister is in it, carefully described without the use of gender-specific pronouns. There is also a general musing on the nature of time itself.The book shows its age a little in that these days Stephen, as a successful author and father of a missing child, would surely be recognisable to just about everyone in the country thanks to the tabloids, but he somehow manages to wander through life unmolested. Also, I wasn’t entirely convinced by the surreal sections – one involving a ‘hallucination’, and another involving the climbing of a tree which bore such an uncanny resemblance to the Magic Faraway Tree that I’m surprised the estate of the late Enid Blyton didn’t sue. My favourite part by far was the sideways look at the way the official line on how children ‘should’ be brought up changes almost daily. As a parent, I thought that was spot on.