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The Children Act (novel)

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Revision as of 11:55, 30 March 2015 by GrahamHardy (talk | contribs) (→Inspiration)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) This article is about the novel. For the Act of Parliament, see Children Act 1989.
The Children Act
First edition (UK)
AuthorIan McEwan
Cover artistGilles Peress
(Magnum Photos)
LanguageEnglish
PublisherJonathan Cape
Publication date2 September 2014
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Pages224 pages
ISBN978-0-224-10199-8

The Children Act is a novel by the English writer Ian McEwan, published on 2 September 2014. The title is a reference to the Children Act 1989, a UK Act of Parliament.

Plot Introduction

Fiona Maye is a respected High Court Judge specializing in Family Law. But though outwardly successful, in her private life she must contend with the regret of childlessness and the announcement by her husband that he is about to embark on an affair. Meanwhile she is called upon to rule in the case of Adam, a seventeen year old boy suffering from leukemia who is refusing crucial a blood transfusion on account of his beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness.

Inspiration

Ian McEwan explains his inspiration in an essay he wrote for The Guardian which begins, "Some years ago I found myself at dinner with a handful of judges – a bench is the collective noun. They were talking shop, and I was politely resisting the urge to take notes...How easily, I thought at the time, this bench could be mistaken for a group of novelists discussing each other's work, reserving harsher strictures for those foolish enough to be absent. At one point, our host, Sir Alan Ward, an appeal court judge, wanting to settle some mild disagreement, got up and reached from a shelf a bound volume of his own judgments. An hour later, when we had left the table for coffee, that book lay open on my lap. It was the prose that struck me first. Clean, precise, delicious. Serious, of course, compassionate at points, but lurking within its intelligence was something like humour, or wit, derived perhaps from its godly distance, which in turn reminded me of a novelist's omniscience."

External links

Works by Ian McEwan
Novels
Story collections
Children's novels
Television plays
Screenplays
  1. Ian McEwan: the law versus religious belief, The Guardian, Friday 5th September 2014.
  2. Sarah E Green, solicitor at TLT, reviews Ian McEwan’s latest novel which concerns a High Court judge in the Family Division Retrieved 2015-03-30.
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