September 21, 2016

Ian McEwan

Harvard Book Store welcomes bestselling author of Atonement and The Children Act IAN MCEWAN and STEVEN PINKER, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, for a discussion of McEwan's latest novel, Nutshell.

Details

Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home—a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse—but John's not there. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.

Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

About Author(s)

Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of sixteen books, including the novels The Children ActSweet ToothSolar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil BeachSaturdayAtonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both short-listed 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.

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. His research has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the American Psychological Association, and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received several teaching awards and many prizes for his books The Language InstinctHow the Mind WorksThe Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  He has been named Humanist of the Year, Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today,” and Foreign Policy “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals.” He has written for The New York TimesTimeThe New RepublicThe New Yorker, and other publications on consciousness, genomics, morality, war and peace, and of course, language.