Sweet Tooth

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What to expect

Ian McEwan’s mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty audiobook of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self.

Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency. The Cold War has entered a moribund phase, but the fight goes on, especially in the cultural sphere.

Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is sent on a ‘secret mission’ which brings her into the literary world of Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage – trust no one.

The Sweet Tooth audiobook is beautifully narrated by Juliet Stevenson.

Critics Review

  • Highly entertaining

    Guardian Books of the Year
  • Gloriously readable and, at times, wickedly funny

    Irish Times
  • Sweet Tooth takes the expectations and tropes of the Cold War thriller and ratchets up the suspense, while turning it into something else… A well-crafted pleasure to read, its smooth prose and slippery intelligence sliding down like cream

    Independent
  • Sublime…impressive…rich and enjoyable

    Financial Times
  • Riveting… Delicious… Gripping

    Guardian

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