The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well-until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, who is entering adolescence with all of its attendant curiosity and appetites.

Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents’ deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. A father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. This “powerful and disconcerting” novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Children Act and Atonement ( The Daily Telegraph) tells the story of a dying family who live in a dying part of the city.

It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable.' - Sunday Times 'A shocking book, morbid, full of repellant imagery - and irresistibly readable.The effect achieved by McEwan's quiet, precise and sensuous touch is that of magic realism - a transfiguration of the ordinary that has far stronger retinal and visceral impact than the flabby surrealism of so many experimental novels.' - 'New York Review of Books''His writing is exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing.' - 'The Times''The Maestro.' - 'New Statesman''McEwan has-a style and a vision of life of his own.No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary Britain can afford not to read him.' - John Fowles 'A sparkling and adventurous writer.Orphaned siblings create a macabre secret world for themselves in this “irresistibly readable” novel by the New York Times-bestselling author ( The New York Review of Books).

His account of deprivation and survival is marvellously sure, and the imaginative alignment of his story is exactly right.' - Tom Paulin 'Marvellously creates the atmosphere of youngsters given that instant adulthood they all crave, where the ordinary takes on a mysterious glow and the extraordinary seems rather commonplace.

'Darkly impressive.' - 'The Times' 'A superb achievement: his prose has instant, lucid beauty and his narrative voice has a perfect poise and certainty.

The cement garden book review