The Innocent

It's the most tightly plotted of Ian McEwan's novels, and to argue properly for its excellence would involve showing how the political and emotional themes are inseparable from its narrative ingenuity, the patterns of revelation and about-turn which mark its final pages

Jonathan Coe, Guardian

The sheer cleverness of the book is dazzling, and only fully to be appreciated as you turn the last page

London Review of Books

To call The Innocent a spy novel would be like calling Lord of the Flies a boy's adventure yarn...it ensure McEwan's major status

Sunday Times

Generous in scale, simple in its hideous impact... Ironically, he has celebrated the obsequies of the East-West spy thriller by writing one of the subtlest

Mail on Sunday

Never less than wholly entertaining

Wall Street Journal

Deft, taut fiction... Many English writers have been compared to Evelyn Waugh, often wrongly, but this book can stand with the master's best

The Times

So exhaustively suspenseful that it should be devoured at one sitting... McEwan fuses a spy-novel plot with themes as venerable as the myth of Adam and Eve

Newsweek

Has the spooky, crooked-angled, danger-around-every-corner feeling of a Carol Reid film. It reminded me often of The Third Man and that is no mean feat

Jonathan Carroll, Washington Post Book World

Powerful and disturbing...a tour de force

New York Times

The plot crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense

Sunday Times