The Children Act, Ian McEwan
The Children Act, Ian McEwan
7 Rating(s)
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
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The Children Act

Author: Ian McEwan

Narrator: Lindsay Duncan

Unabridged: 6 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/09/2014


Synopsis

A brilliant, emotionally wrenching new novel from the author of Atonement and Amsterdam Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child's welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts. But Fiona's professional success belies domestic strife. Her husband, Jack, asks her to consider an open marriage and, after an argument, moves out of their house. His departure leaves her adrift, wondering whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability; whether it was not contempt and ostracism she really fears. She decides to throw herself into her work, especially a complex case involving a seventeen-year-old boy whose parents will not permit a lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with their beliefs as Jehovah's Witnesses. But Jack doesn't leave her thoughts, and the pressure to resolve the case-as well as her crumbling marriage-tests Fiona in ways that will keep readers thoroughly enthralled until the last stunning page.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily May on November 22, 2014

Do you like to people watch? You know what I mean... just sit somewhere in a busy place and watch people bustle past in all their colourful weirdness. It's a habit I've acquired with age. Sometimes I think back to being a teenager and remember how I always wondered if I was strange in some way - I gu......more

Goodreads review by Jim on July 31, 2023

My seventh McEwan. This one strikes me as a bit different from the others I've read. It's almost like a 'legal thriller' akin to a John Grisham although I don’t mean to imply that Grisham’s popular writing style is like McEwan’s more literary style. The main character is a woman at the peak of her ca......more

Goodreads review by John on September 09, 2014

THE CHILDREN ACT is about the law and sensational cases, but it is not a legal thriller. Rather, it is a beautiful and sad story of a High Court Judge forced to choose, literally, between life and death. Her ruling, though proper and legally sound, leads to both.......more

Goodreads review by Baba on September 04, 2021

A High Court judge of great standing, almost 60, Fiona is the quintessential successful career woman; after years of good living, career carving and a good marriage, her husband asks for her permission to have an affair. This supposedly earnest (selfish) request derails Fiona whilst she's overseeing......more

Goodreads review by Katie on September 04, 2016

You could argue that the character at the heart of this novel is dangerously close to being a misogynistic cliché - the career woman who deep freezes her feelings in order to succeed professionally. Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in her late fifties. At the beginning of the novel her husband, madd......more