Friday, October 16, 2009

PRESS RELEASE FROM RANDOM HOUSE UK

A NEW NOVEL BY IAN McEWAN

Jonathan Cape, a Random House Group imprint, is delighted to announce the publication of a new novel by Ian McEwan. Solar, an engrossing and satirical novel which focuses on climate change, will be published in hardback in the UK on 18 March 2010. It will also be published simultaneously by Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday in the US and Knopf in Canada. This story - of one man’s ambitions and self-deceptions - is a stylish new work by one of the world’s greatest living writers.

Solar synopsis:
With a global scope, Solar deals directly with the crises of today.

Michael Beard is in his late fifties; bald, overweight, unprepossessing – a Nobel prizewinning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he lectures for enormous fees and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. An inveterate philanderer, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. When Beard’s professional and personal worlds are entwined in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself, a chance for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster.

Dan Franklin, Publisher, comments: ‘Solar is a novel about one of the most serious threats to our world -- global warming -- but is also very, very funny. It shows a fresh side to Ian McEwan's work, that he's a comic writer of genius.'

Ian McEwan
McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). Atonement was also made into an Oscar-winning film. He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year.

Footnote:
Now that is impressive ! The Bookman, a great fan of McEwan's writing, will await SOLAR with great and increasing impatience.

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