His First Novel

This afternoon we watched the last of my booked live online talks from the Edinburgh International Book Festival - the novelist Ian McEwan. 

I am awaiting his 18th novel to be published in a couple of weeks, but we both remember reading his first novel - the very strange, almost macabre The Cement Garden. The kind of book one never forgets and we have had a long time to forget - it was published in 1978 and our edition, the one I have just got from the book shelves that cost £1.25 and is pictured here, is from 1980. It's a bit battered! 

We also remember seeing him around that time when he was at an early Ilkley Literature Festival event in a church hall. Amazing how we remember it so well from that long ago. It was probably his first event as a new writer and he would have been very young, as he is the same age as us and we were young then!!

And we’ve been reading his books ever since. I don’t think I have read them all, although I found quite a few on the shelves. I am now off to read The Cement Garden . . . I won’t be recommending it!