WINNER OF THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE PRIZE FOR COMIC FICTION
'A stunningly accomplished work, possibly his best yet...both funny and serious, light and dark, morally engaged and ironically detached' Financial Times
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her.
When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, this is a story of one man's greed and self-deception; a darkly satirical novel showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time.
'A satirical masterpiece... It will come to be regarded as a classic' Daily Telegraph
'Wonderfully enjoyable... He shows a side to himself as a writer - a puckishness, a broadness of humour, an extravagance of style - that we haven't seen before' Sam Leith, Spectator
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A novel that promises comedy as well as crisis - Guardian
McEwan has already aired extracts ... and the warmth, humour and zest of the book were unmistakable - Sunday Times
McEwan avoids the problem of how to dramatise and emotive area of science by uncharacteristically and highly effectively deploying a sly streak of comedy. - Metro
Climate-change comedy that's every bit as brilliant as its title suggests - The Sunday Times
Solar has an engagingly direct, bleakly comic view of science and scientists. It also convinces. - Times Literary Supplement
From an early stage, [McEwan's] sumptuously textured language rested on a flair for finely engineered design. - The Independent
Michael Beard is a comic creation in the same class as Martin Amis's John Self. Indeed, if Money could be seen as the high point of Amis's career, summing up the excesses of the Eighties, so Solar is likely to come to be regarded as the equivalent for McEwan. For this novel takes on the political obsession of our age - climate change - and fashions out of it a satirical masterpiece... McEwan is in many ways the closest thing we have to a national novelist... it will come to be regarded as a classic - Daily Telegraph
Vivacious and sprawling, a beautifully and compellingly written novel...McEwan's achievement is the brilliant creation of a flawed, larger than life character who all but walks off the page to shake your hand. - The Times
This is an absorbing, accomplished, instructive, and very funny novel bye one of fiction's most fecund minds - Country Life
McEwan's reputation as one of Britain's greatest living writers remained safely intact - Sunday Express
He's green and he should be read - The Observer
McEwan excels at climate science but his protagonist makes you shudder. - The Observer
A sensitive study of selfishness versus altruism - Mail on Sunday
An ambivalent, comic picaresque of cunning and subtle wisdom ... McEwan's established readers will enjoy it, as will everyone else, not only for the humour but for many moments of eerie truth - Irish Times
Maybe most intractably, there's the problem of response-fatigue. Pressing invitations to think about global warming aren't thin on the ground. McEwan's solution is both elegant and surprising: instead of applying doom and gloom, he reaches for a lighter, more comic mode than usual.'...'...the overarching plot pulls off a clinching novelistic coup, using comedy to sneak grimmer matters past the reader's defences. - Guardian
Climate-change comedy that's every bit as brilliant as its title suggests - The Sunday Times
Masterful prose - Time Out
A sharp, satirical tale - Grazia
Superbly written with some sublime set pieces.... Read it and purr with pleasure. Solar radiates joy from start to finish and is never less than entertaining. It can't fail to put a smile on your face. - Tatler
Among the best and most entertaining of McEwan's books - The Lady
This is an entertaining book and there are, as always, exquisite moments of observation - The Tablet
The best Ian McEwan I've read so far - Farm Lane Books blog
Reliably entertaining - Literary Review
Sizzling lucidity distinguishes this enormously entertaining novel about rationality and unreason. Right up to its final moment - teasingly poised between the heart-warming and heart-stopping... - scarcely a page fails to dazzle with some wittily caught perception about contemporary life. Blazing with imaginative and intellectual energy, Solar is a stellar performance - The Sunday Times
Beard is as robust and full-fleshed and ebullient a character as McEwan has come up with. And in Solar, he shows a side to himself as a writer - a puckishness, a broadness of humour, an extravagance of style - that we haven't seen before - Spectator
There are only a handful of contemporary novelists whose new books are viewed as cultural events', and one of these is Ian McEwan...A Booker contender, for sure - Cara-Enjoy your Flight
Fascinating - The Spectator
Excellent...the turn here is new and interesting. - The New Yorker Review
The science doesn't take over the story, but it gives it necessary body and depth, and helps in attempting to understand the work of a climate change physical in some way.' 'McEwan displays Michael's character brilliantly.' 'Solar raises a fundamental, and tropical, point- how we race (or slowly plod) to reverse climate change.' - Booktrust.org.uk
Ian McEwan's venture into comedy for his latest novel, Solar is a triumph. McEwan has researched his topic thoroughly and environmentalists will find much to enjoy here - The Environmentalist
I love just about all the books of his...his latest novel, which I'm reading now, is every bit as good as his previous work. - Daily Express
McEwan's first overtly comic novel promises sunshine on several fronts - Independent
McEwan is on top form in an exuberant and comic tale of a priapic and cynical Nobel scientist wrestling with both his conscience and his outsized appetites - Sunday Times Summer Reading
Absorbing, comic and hugely enjoyable - Emma Lee-Potter, Daily Express Summer Reading
Human beings are frail, Mother Nature is implacable - and old McEwan is as bleakly entertaining as ever. - The Times
Hugely entertaining and the deserved winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction - Tatler
The book opens up another dimension of McEwan's genius as a novelist... Right up to the final moment scarcely a page fails to dazzle. Blazing with imaginative and intellectual energy, Solar is a stellar performance. - Sunday Times
Takes on climate change through the weirdly compelling personage of Martin Beard, a scientist on the edge in every way. McEwan is never less than entertaining. - The Times, Christmas round up
McEwan's book, which sizzles with intelligence, offers a rich spectrum of comedy, form zestful farce to satiric wit - Sunday Times, Christmas Books
Crafty, comic spin on climate change - Independent, Christmas round up
A marvellous return to witty form - Evening Standard, Christmas round up
Ian McEwan's dark, satirical novel takes one of the obsessions of our era - climate change - and forges it into a masterpiece. - Telegraph - Editor's Choice
It's an unusual foray into satire - part misadventure, but descending into something much bleaker. - Seven
Ian McEwan is not generally known as a write of laugh-out-loud fiction, but Solar - inspired by the uncomic subject of climate change - is just that. - Independent
McEwan is a master at the height of his powers, and his prose sparkles and glitters with mischief and malice. He pokes fun at government scientific policy, at international conferences - at M-theory, even. You'll be chuckling so hard you won't notice that this is really a tragedy. And by then, it's too late. - Irish Post
McEwan has succeeded in producing a novel that is both profoundly serious and hilariously funny. - Mail on Sunday
Entertaining - and often very funny - Sunday Times, Summer Reading
Ian McEwan is the author of two collections of stories and eleven previous novels, including Enduring Love, Amsterdam, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1998, Atonement and, most recently, On Chesil Beach.
