It is in this period that our narrator, Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’), ends up working for MI5 and becoming a spy as part of a project called ‘Sweet Tooth’. ‘Sweet Tooth’ is set in London during the early 1970’s which, looking back, was a time of great uncertainty with the IRA and the Cold War and a time of social change illustrated in part by, as McEwan brings up more than once, supermarkets and supermarket trolleys cropping up here there and everywhere. But before it does, he sets her up for an interview with MI5, with which he's been affiliated.****, Jonathan Cape, 2012, hardback, fiction, 320 pages, kindly sent by the publisher

She falls into an affair with her ex-lover's much older married professor, which ends badly. Serena, a lusty speed-reader who devours novels that preferably end in marriage proposals, has struggled through math studies at Cambridge University, graduating at the bottom of her class with no idea of her future. Almost guaranteed to send you back to the beginning once you reach the end, it is a tricky book to discuss without revealing its surprise twist, which is best left for readers to discover for themselves.Ī critic for the London Observer astutely dubbed Sweet Tooth, with its elaborately recursive layers of fictions within fictions, a 'Russian doll of a novel.' On its surface, the book is Serena Frome's story of her short-lived, botched career with MI5 (short for Military Intelligence Section Five) in the early 1970s, when she was a young beauty and Britain's identity as an empire was in free fall. But where Atonement compels on every level, from its country house opening to its war and hospital scenes, Sweet Tooth is most satisfying after its final revelations. Both novels also feature intriguingly complex, layered structures, the keys to which are withheld until the final pages. Readers will be happy to know that Sweet Tooth shares more with Atonement than with Solar, McEwan's disappointing previous novel - including a female protagonist and concerns with love, betrayal, doubt and the relationship between literature and truth. The novel is set 40 years ago, when communism was still perceived as a threat, and takes its title from a fictional clandestine mission by Britain's MI5 intelligence service to sponsor writers espousing the Cold Warrior cause.

Ian McEwan's 15th book of fiction, Sweet Tooth, is a Tootsie Roll Pop of a literary confection - hard-boiled candy enrobing a chewy surprise at its core. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Sweet Tooth Author Ian McEwan

Sweet tooth novel review