Machines Like Me

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Lessons

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Machines Like Me

By: Ian McEwan

Narrated by: Billy Howle

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Summary

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, read by Billy Howle.

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.

Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. 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 of the power to invent things beyond our control.

Ian McEwanBilly HowleVintage Digital

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Literary Fiction

Science Fiction

Cyberpunk

Computer Science

Heartfelt

Thought-Provoking

Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Cyberpunk Computer Science Heartfelt Thought-Provoking

Critic reviews

Machines Like Me reminds us that McEwan is a once-in-a-generation talent, offering readerly pleasure, cerebral incisiveness and an enticing imagination.

[Machines Like Me] is right up there with his very best [novels]. Machines Like Me manages to combine the dark acidity of McEwan’s great early stories with the crowd-pleasing readability of his more recent work. A novel this smart oughtn’t to be such fun, but it is. (Alex Preston)

Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me is a dazzling account of our interaction with technology… He marries a gripping plot, handled with rarefied skill and dexterity, to a deep excavation of the narrowing gap between the canny and the uncanny, leaving the reader pleasurably dizzied, and marvelling at human existence. (Philip Womack)

Compelling… unforgettably strange… there are many pleasures and many moments of profound disquiet in this book, which reminds you of its author’s mastery of the underrated craft of storytelling… [Machines Like Me] is morally complex and very disturbing, animated by a spirit of sinister and intelligent mischief that feels unique to its author. (Marcel Theroux)

[McEwan's] fierce intelligence [crackles] like a Jumping Jack on Bonfire Night… Arguably the finest English writer of his generation, the ideas he explores are important, now more that ever. (Richard Dismore)

[McEwan is] as mordant a chronicler of the age as we have… Machines Like Me offers as good a primer on the multifarious anxieties that should afflict us all as anything catalogued as “non-fiction”. (Bill Prince)

Machines like Me displays… impressive richness. Excited by ideas and perceptive about emotions, encompassing cutting-edge science, philosophical speculation and lively social observation, it is funny, thought-provoking and politically acute… In this bravura performance, literary flair and cerebral sizzle winningly combine. (Peter Kemp)

Original, and as always with McEwan’s novels, beautifully written.

McEwan knows all the novelistic rules… [and his] restlessness when it comes to subject matter, even as he enters his seventies, is stunning… [Machines Like Me] shimmer[s] with relevance. (Janan Ganesh)

[Machines Like Me] traverses the muddled morality of Artificial Intelligence... This is new and exciting ground for McEwan, one of Britain's most consistently brilliant writers. (Olivia Ovenden)

Most relevant

You become so quickly engrossed with and empathetic with the characters, it has so much depth, I will have to listen to it again, after my subconscious and conscious mind have grappled with the implications arising from many of the issues traversed in this brilliant book.