4.5 I really appreciate character driven books and this novel delivers. I also enjoyed the history lessons along the way.

Gorgeous prose. A wonderful story.

Just my favorite type of novel to read. Long, meandering, exhaustive. The kind of book that makes you feel you really have lived an entire life, and that whatever you thought the story of your life was going to be at any given point turns out not to be the story at all. Mostly I listened to the audiobook and I think I’ll need to buy it to reread in print in a few months.

Ian McEwan is an interesting man and writer - this would have to be as uninteresting as he can be, I'd think, and it still wasn't bad. But the prose wasn't his chrystaline standard, it was merely workmanlike, and the characters beyond the narrator were woefully underdeveloped. I never got the faintest feeling of knowing even the most primary and ever-present of them.

The challenge for the reader is how to keep Questioning life without loosing sanity after reading this book.

Great read, beautiful prose.

I loved this new book By Ian McEwan as much as his other novels. Lessons is an all-encompassing story of Roland Baines's life from childhood in Tripoli to aging in London. Roland started life in overseas locations where his dad was in the military. When Roland got to proper school age, he was forced to attend a government-run boarding school in England. Naturally, his days there was misery, and he missed his much-loved mother and the love only she gave to the young boy.

In this sweeping life novel, McEwan manages, as always, to give us global history and current politics, from the Suez Canal crisis, the Bay of Pigs debacle, and the election of Trump along with a pandemic of COVID. Throughout the setbacks on the world stage, Roland managed to find love and always seemed to have a woman to fulfill his intimacy needs. Roland is, at times, likable and, other times, pathetic. McEwan gives us a story of ourselves, the deep secrets we care not to divulge. I loved this long novel and appreciate McEwan taking me up to current times in the age group I fit into today. I sound like a fangirl, but I have always been one in McEwan novels.

Thank you very much to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

An entire life, almost. I’ll fill in later.