Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan
Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan
15 Rating(s)
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Machines Like Me
A Novel

Author: Ian McEwan

Narrator: Steven Crossley

Unabridged: 11 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 04/23/2019


Synopsis

New from Ian McEwan, Booker Prize winner and international bestselling author of Atonement and The Children Act Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong, and clever-a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma. Ian McEwan's subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions: What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns against the power to invent things beyond our control.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily May on May 03, 2019

Three days before, she had asked a mysterious question. We were mid-embrace, in the conventional position. She drew my face towards hers. Her look was serious. She whispered, "Tell me something. Are you real?" I didn’t reply. A few days ago, my sister introduced me to the bizarre world of soap cu......more

Goodreads review by Issicratea on April 27, 2019

At points in my reading of Machines Like Me, I toyed with the idea that Ian McEwan was experimenting with a daring novelistic conceit. Could it be true that he was deliberately constructing a lame and lackluster plot involving two of the most unengaging characters I have encountered in fiction in or......more

Goodreads review by Ron on May 01, 2019

Charlie Friend is a lazy day-trader in London who vacillates between bouts of grandiosity and worthlessness. The ultimate early adopter, Charlie uses a recent inheritance to buy “the first truly viable manufactured human with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expressi......more

Goodreads review by Djali on April 14, 2022

3,5 Incredibile come siano reali, presenti, i personaggi creati dalla penna di McEwan. Tanto che, nel ricordo, ti sembra di averli avuti accanto, di averci intrattenuto vere e proprie conversazioni, di averci condiviso momenti e sensazioni (aver amato, pianto, riso con loro). La sua passione per il mo......more

Goodreads review by Mark on December 12, 2020

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan was much more than I expected. The story involves thirty-something Charlie using his inheritance to buy a Synthetic Human called Adam (yes Adam), these things are so advanced they are indistinguishable from real human beings. You buy one, plug it in and have some decis......more