Machines Like Me cover art

Machines Like Me

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Machines Like Me

By: Ian McEwan
Narrated by: Billy Howle
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

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.

 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)
All stars
Most relevant
Ian McEwan is my favourite writer and the standard he sets himself is incredibly high. Easy then to fall short and disappoint the reader? No chance. This is as good, if not better, than anything he's written before. It is fresh, creative, scary and impeccably written. Set in the eighties, it's in a similarly dislocated reality to Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' in that it takes what we think we know and throws it all up in the air. For example, Alan Turing is still alive, Mrs Thatcher is still in power having lost the war in the Falklands, Tony Benn is leader of the opposition and so on. There are many 'Sliding Doors' moments that form the backdrop to the central story of the love triangle between man, woman and robot. I've read a few snide reviews of this book and don't agree with them at all. I found this an entertaining, challenging and exceptionally well written novel that deserves our highest praise. I also think that we should rejoice that McEwen is still delivering the goods and hope that he continues for many years to come.

Our world but not as we know it

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The story is cleverly set in the past which adds familiarity, but is based on a future technology that we are yet to know. it is thought provoking
I listened to it at 1.4x speed which actually makes the voice of the reader sound like a stereotypical android. a bit like jude law in AI

A compelling story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Excellent narration brings this exploration into what it means to be human and the moral compromises that follow from there.

Thoughtful, disquieting but always engaging.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Still thinking about this novel and how it resonates with current politics and decision making

the impact of lies on humans and other sentient be

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Boring story, the most interesting (androids-related) stuff happens behind the scenes, the forgettable middle class main characters drag the predictable plot at a slow pace. I was reminded why I stopped reading McEwan's novels years ago.

Boring enough

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews