April 2010 Indie Next List

“Nobel Prize-winning English physicist Michael Beard is a human being of extremes: very bright, very lazy, overweight, over married (five times), amoral, and rapacious. Despite early success, he has become irrelevant until a lucky break furnishes him with material to change course, become an environmental darling, and appear to save the world. McEwan, as usual, writes a taut plot line, with suspense and dread of retribution building with each turned page.”
— Darwin Ellis, Books on the Common, Ridgefield, CT