Sweet Tooth

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Sweet Tooth

By: Ian McEwan

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson

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About this listen

Ian McEwan’s mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty audiobook of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self.

Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency. The Cold War has entered a moribund phase, but the fight goes on, especially in the cultural sphere.

Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is sent on a ‘secret mission’ which brings her into the literary world of Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage – trust no one.

The Sweet Tooth audiobook is beautifully narrated by Juliet Stevenson.

20th Century

Espionage

Genre Fiction

Historical

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Spies & Politics

Thriller & Suspense

Fiction

Witty

Critic reviews

Highly entertaining

Gloriously readable and, at times, wickedly funny

Sweet Tooth takes the expectations and tropes of the Cold War thriller and ratchets up the suspense, while turning it into something else... A well-crafted pleasure to read, its smooth prose and slippery intelligence sliding down like cream

Sublime...impressive...rich and enjoyable

Riveting... Delicious... Gripping

A brilliant portrayal of 1970s Britain at its absolute worst… But it's also a gripping spy novel with some characteristic McEwan twists toward the end

A web of spying, subterfuge, deceit and betrayal... Acute, witty...winningly cunning

Playful, comic... This is a great big Russian doll of a novel, and in its construction – deft, tight, exhilaratingly immaculate – is a huge part of its pleasure...exerts a keen emotional pull

McEwan’s mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty story of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self

Fans of Ian McEwan should rejoice with the arrival of this novel... An extraordinary, irresistible work of fiction

Most relevant

From the very beginning I was drawn into this book not least because of Juliet Stevenson's lovely voice. It's a mutli-layered narrative set in the early 70s with a backdrop of the three-day week, strikes and political upheaval, MI5 operations but in the forefront are the human relationships. The characters spring to life and I wanted to know what happens to them. I was sorry when the book ended.