Ian McEwen was hailed as brilliant from his first book. A collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites won the 1975 M. Somerset Maugham award. His reputation only grew in the ensuing years, as he went on to claim the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other accolades. His 2001 novel Atonement sold in massive quantities and was made into a fine film. What makes McEwan’s acclaim unusual is that he is not a formal innovator. It cannot be said that he—like, say, David Foster Wallace or Salman Rushdie—bumps forward fiction’s possibilities.
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