“Atonement” Author Ian McEwan Has a New Novel, and Oprah Daily Has the Cover Reveal
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Virtuoso British writer Ian McEwan has been nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize six times, winning in 1998 for Amsterdam. In the U.S., he’s perhaps best known for Atonement (2001), a Booker finalist made into an Oscar-winning film starring Saoirse Ronan, Keira Knightley, and James McAvoy. Oprah Daily has the backstory on the cover design for McEwan’s eloquent, enthralling new novel, Lessons, arguably his most commanding work in decades, which Knopf will publish on September 13th.
With its Day-Glo colors and stylized typography, the cover evokes Carnaby Street, Thatcher’s Cold War, and beyond: Britain in the throes of postwar transformation, embodied by Roland Baines, a haunted middle-aged man grappling with secrets he’s kept hidden since childhood. “The boy’s awkward and studious pose, his half-concealed face, his exposed nape, those short pants we were made to wear at school back in the 1950s—all speak to a tender vulnerability,” McEwan told us. “The nonrepresentational color and especially the boy’s formless but unreally brilliant shadow suggest a future self that will be pursued by memories of a piano lesson that profoundly altered the course of his life. Young Roland was 11, at boarding school, 2,000 miles away from home. His teacher, a young woman, touched him physically and mentally and set in motion something wild and mad. All this at a time when the world seemed about to destroy itself.
“Forty-five years later, Roland would track her down, hoping for a reckoning. It amazes and gratifies me how an artist and designer can collaborate to catch so much with a few simple lines and color volumes. I love this jacket, and I hope others will, too.”
McEwan has always been aggressively political, on and off the page. As Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur observes, “Ian illustrates, through these characters and their experiences, how our lives—our personalities, even—are so profoundly affected by the politics of our time: the brief but lasting terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis that embedded itself in an entire generation; the more prolonged and devastating impact of life behind the Iron Curtain; the transformative and often destructive power of economic policies. One of the many miracles of the novel is its total absence of anything didactic or strident in the way it offers these observations, but you can’t emerge from it without a better understanding of the roles history and politics play in our own lives.”
Longtime McEwan fans will recognize the stylistic prowess of his sentences in Lessons. “Elegant is a good word for it,” Arthur says. “There’s something so direct and intimate about the narrative.” And she echoes him on the subtleties of the composition: “I confess that it was so unexpected and far from what I’d initially imagined that I took some time to appreciate its brilliance, which I now celebrate for its originality and boldness and in the vulnerable and diligent pose of that young boy who I know and love. I also love the fact that our creative director, John Gall, provides a small Easter egg for music fans via that font—I’ll let those fans discover that for themselves.”
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