His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. McEwan's neat, tensile prose raises this book to the highest level of the genre.

Though its plot rivals any thriller in narrative tension, this novel is also a character study-of a young man coming of age in bizarre circumstances, and of differences in national character: the gentlemanly Brits, all decorum and civility the brash, impatient Americans the cynical Germans. Acting to save himself from a prison sentence, Leonard desperately performs an act of espionage whose ironic consequences resonate down the years to a twister of an ending.

As his two secret worlds come together, events develop into a gruesome nightmare, building to a searing, unforgettable scene of surrealist intensity in which Leonard and his lover try to conceal evidence of a murder. At the same time that he loses his political innocence, Leonard experiences his sexual initiation in a clandestine affair with a German divorcee five years his senior. The protagonist, Leonard Marnham, is a 25-year-old, naive, unsophisticated English post office technician who is astonished and alarmed to find himself involved in a top-secret operation. Psychological thriller set in Berlin during the Cold War, based on an actual (but little known) incident which tells of the secret tunnel under the Soviet sector which the British and Americans built in 1954 to gain access to the Russians' communication system.

1998 ian mcewan novel