---
product_id: 44223564
title: "Nutshell: A Novel"
brand: "ian mcewan"
price: "184 Lei"
currency: RON
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.ro/products/44223564-nutshell-a-novel
store_origin: RO
region: Romania
---

# Nutshell: A Novel

**Brand:** ian mcewan
**Price:** 184 Lei
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** Nutshell: A Novel by ian mcewan
- **How much does it cost?** 184 Lei with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.ro](https://www.desertcart.ro/products/44223564-nutshell-a-novel)

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## Description

Nutshell: A Novel

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![Nutshell: A Novel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/418c+UYtT1L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Nutshell by Ian McEwan: A review
  

*by P***N on Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2016*

"God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually."- from NutshellAnd eventually, luckily for us, there was Ian McEwan, a writer who routinely delivers such lyrical prose that a dedicated reader could weep for pure joy. In Nutshell, he's done it again.How can one adequately describe this weird and wonderful little novel? The plot is based on Shakespeare's Hamlet, but our narrator is an eighth-month fetus, preternaturally aware and attuned to the ways of the world. He resides "upside down in a woman" and is privy to all that the woman is privy to, including the plot devised by her and her lover (her brother-in-law) to kill her husband, our narrator's father. McEwan's tale is essentially a two-hundred page soliloquy by that fetus as he watches in horror as their plan proceeds. It is absurd but dazzlingly imaginative and clever and somehow manages to be both suspenseful and profound. It is philosophical in range, in its view of a world that the narrator has not yet entered but imagines all too perfectly; it is a comedy that is marked by moments of tragedy.To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.Thus speaks our narrator/fetus/philosopher.Our narrator reveals himself to be as much of a ham as a Hamlet. He has developed a well-informed taste for wine and a worldly grasp of current events gained through attentive listening to the educational podcasts preferred by his mother for her insomniac amusement. When he is bored at night, he kicks his mother awake so she will entertain him.He recoils in horror at the active sex life pursued by his mother in her advanced state of pregnancy and cringes at the assault of her lover's penis pounding close by his soft skull.He worries about what will happen to him if their murder plans succeed. Will his mother wind up in prison and will he be born there? Or even if her culpability is not discovered, will she give him up to some foster home or orphanage in order to pursue an unfettered life? The plans he hears her discussing certainly don't seem to include a baby.In despair at his impotence, he considers suicide by strangling himself on his own umbilical cord. ("To be, or not to be...") But there, he realizes, is the rub.Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies.Every sentence of this short novel seems burnished to perfection. For example, the precocious fetus describes his uncle Claude, the murder conspirator, as a man "whose impoverished sentences die like motherless chicks, cheaply fading." Cheaply fading - one understands Claude completely in that phrase. And did I mention that the fetus' father is a poet and publisher of poets, a purveyor of rich and meaningful sentences?McEwan has shown a preference for short novels. The last one of his that I read was The Children Act, another brief and well-polished gem. One gets the impression that he is not willing to accept anything else than perfection in his prose and so he whittles everything down to the essentials. This might not be everyone's cup of tea, but for those of us who find brevity to be the soul of wit and who enjoy a bit of philosophy with our fiction, it is hot and tasty and just right.There is so much insight contained in this short book. The narrator describes a world where poverty and war, "with climate change held in reserve," is driving millions from their homes, vast movements of angry or desolate or hopeful people, "crammed at borders against the razor-wire gates, drowning in thousands to share in the fortunes of the West." His description of faith-based violence and the inanity of identity politics seems a perfect diagnosis of much of what ails modern society.In this 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death, there have been a plethora of rewrites of his plots and themes. A number of them have been successful, some less so. None of them - at least of the ones that I've read - have attained the conspicuous brilliance of McEwan's effort and his beautiful prose. It is a unique bravura performance.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Troubling tour de force
  

*by P***L on Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2021*

This novel is narrated by a foetus, but not just any foetus: he will be Hamlet when he emerges, having engineered the arrest of his mother Trudy and her cloddish lover Claude for the murder of his admirable father. He knows what's going on because he's old enough to hear conversations near him and to listen to the interminable pod casts with which his mother puts herself to sleep. McEwan maintains the fiction with prodigious consistency, and many readers have found the book to be funny.There is a sly wit at work here, but to me it is fueled by white-hot rage at the degeneracy of modern society (some of which I admit that I share)--with a soupcon of disgust at the bodily functions of females. I'm reminded of Jonathan Swift's disillusioned view of Celia at her dressing table: yes indeed, she s--ts!Readers who share McEwan's predilections will not be put off by the novel's elitism, with all its unattributed quotes from Shakespeare's play (his name is neve mentioned), not to mention the central conceit embodied in the characters' names. If you have never read and re-read the play Hamlet, well, you don't deserve to understand!Please note, I have called this novel a tour de force, and in spite of my distaste for the qualities I have mentioned, I acknowledge its brilliance and I think it would be a very instructive read for any would-be fiction writer, just to see how it's done. For me, well, mercifully, it's short.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    A cute idea for a thriller
  

*by R***S on Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2021*

_Nutshell_ is short, smart and fast suspense novel, very different from _Atonement_, but with the same careful construction and gifted writing. But while in _Atonement_ it takes maybe half the book to know where McEwan is actually going on with the story, _Nutshell_ immediately hooks you: there is something very nasty and ugly going on here. Granted, a lot of poetic liberties are taken in the book for the plot to work (and no irony that two of the characters are indeed poets, one of them an "owl poet"), but all is admissible if you think that the whole story is narrated by someone who is still in the belly of his mother and constantly under the influence of alcohol. Boy, how these guys drink! And all the wines mentioned in the book are well-ranked on Vivino!The image of the mother's belly as a prison where you can't really say what is happening outside made me think of _Oxygen_, the Netflix feature film. But imho, that is not the best part of the whole idea of this book.What is really nice is how it gradually evolves (or decays) and how the characters become increasingly tense and nervous with their own mistakes (or accomplishments). If you think this is Bruce Willis doing the baby's voice in a light comedy like _Look Who's Talking_, think twice. The last of the three acts in _Nutshell_ is nothing but a tense and extremely well-performed thriller that grabs you and doesn't let you go. This is a book to read maybe in one or two chunks, a real page turner.

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*Product available on Desertcart Romania*
*Store origin: RO*
*Last updated: 2026-02-23*