Machines Like Me
Ian McEwan
(Jonathan Cape, 320 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • Tel 020 7799 406

A whiff of the icebox has persisted around the work of Ian McEwan ­(pictured), ever since the publication of his debut, the macabre short-story collection First Love, Last Rites and the grisly novel that followed in 1978, The Cement Garden. Later novels, The Comfort of Strangers, with its ghastly, amoral denouement, and Enduring Love, concerning stalking, only confirmed the impression of a chilly literary intelligence irresistibly drawn to dark material. While subsequent fiction has been warmer and lighter, and he’s even essayed comedy, it wasn’t going to be long before he swooped upon the ethical conundrums of artificial intelligence.