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Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
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Machines Like Me

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Lessons
Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.

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Narrator Billy Howle

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Length 10 hours 54 minutes
Language English
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Random House presents the audiobook edition of Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, read by Billy Howle.

Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding.


Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Mirandaโ€™s assistance, he co-designs Adamโ€™s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever โ€“ a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma. Ian McEwanโ€™s subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions: what makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns of the power to invent things beyond our control.

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; and Nutshell, which was a Number One bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Audiobook details

Author:

Narrator:
Billy Howle

ISBN:
9781473568020

Length:
10 hours 54 minutes

Language:
English

Publisher:
Random House

Publication date:

Edition:
Unabridged

Illustration of person opening a gift

The perfect last-minute gift

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Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

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Reviews

Machines Like Me reminds us that McEwan is once-in-a-generation talent, offering readerly pleasure, cerebral incisiveness and an enticing imagination. [Machines Like Me] is right up there with his very best [novels]. Machines Like Me manages to combine the dark acidity of McEwanโ€™s great early stories with the crowd-pleasing readability of his more recent work. A novel this smart oughtnโ€™t to be such fun, but it is. Ian McEwanโ€™s Machines Like Me is a dazzling account of our interaction with technologyโ€ฆ He marries a gripping plot, handled with rarefied skill and dexterity, to a deep excavation of the narrowing gap between the canny and the uncanny, leaving the reader pleasurably dizzied, and marvelling at human existence. Compellingโ€ฆ unforgettably strangeโ€ฆ there are many pleasures and many moments of profound disquiet in this book, which reminds you of its authorโ€™s mastery of the underrated craft of storytellingโ€ฆ [Machines Like Me] is morally complex and very disturbing, animated by a spirit of sinister and intelligent mischief that feels unique to its author. [McEwan's] fierce intelligence [crackles] like a Jumping Jack on Bonfire Nightโ€ฆ Arguably the finest English writer of his generation, the ideas he explores are important, now more that ever. [McEwan is] as mordant a chronicler of the age as we haveโ€ฆ Machines Like Me offers as good a primer on the multifarious anxieties that should afflict us all as anything catalogued as โ€œnon-fictionโ€. Machines like Me displaysโ€ฆ impressive richness. Excited by ideas and perceptive about emotions, encompassing cutting-edge science, philosophical speculation and lively social observation, it is funny, thought-provoking and politically acuteโ€ฆ In this bravura performance, literary flair and cerebral sizzle winningly combine. Original, and as always with McEwanโ€™s novels, beautifully written. McEwan knows all the novelistic rulesโ€ฆ [and his] restlessness when it comes to subject matter, even as he enters his seventies, is stunningโ€ฆ [Machines Like Me] shimmer[s] with relevance. [Machines Like Me] traverses the muddled morality of Artificial Intelligence... This is new and exciting ground for McEwan, one of Britain's most consistently brilliant writers. Expand reviews
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