Staff Pick
Ian McEwan's Solar is a departure from his serious side. The main character, Professor Michael Beard, is an aging, pompous, and ridiculous Nobel-winning physicist who is far past his prime. He's a messed-up fellow sitting comfortably on the laurels of a discovery made many years earlier. He is duplicitous, self-obsessed, arrogant, and greedy. Yet Beard is one of the funniest characters I've ever come across, and even though the laughs are mostly at his expense, that somehow doesn't make you despise him. McEwan can do serious, tragic, obsessive, morbid, and poignant better than most writers, but it is a delightful surprise to discover that he can do humor as well. This is a wonderful book that is exceedingly deeper than it appears on the surface! Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The literary event of the summer: a new novel from Ian McEwan, as surprising as it is masterful.
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. While he coasts along in his professional life, Michael's personal life is another matter entirely. His fifth marriage is crumbling under the weight of his infidelities. But this time the tables are turned: His wife is having an affair, and Michael realizes he is still in love with her.
When Michael's personal and professional lives begin to intersect in unexpected ways, an opportunity presents itself in the guise of an invitation to travel to New Mexico. Here is a chance for him to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster. Can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity?
A complex novel that brilliantly traces the arc of one man's ambitions and self-deceptions, Solar is a startling, witty, and stylish new work from one of the world's great writers.
Review
"A comedy every bit as brilliant as its title might suggest... Blazing with imaginative and intellectual energy, Solar is a stellar performance." Sunday Times
Review
"[W]here Solar really succeeds — beyond the dark comedy...is the author's ability to reveal the nature of the climate conundrum in the very human life of his protagonist." TIME
Review
"A stunningly accomplished work, possibly [McEwan's] best yet." Financial Times
Review
"The novel opens in 2000; Beard is 53. His professional life has become a swirl of lecture junkets, media punditry and state-funded sinecures. His private life is what consumes most of his energy. Unaccountably attractive to women, he's five years into his fifth marriage — time enough to have crammed in 11 affairs. Then his wife retaliates by bedding their builder." Hephzibah Anderson, Bloomberg.com
About the Author
Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of 13 books, including the novels On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award; and In Between the Sheets. He lives in London.