Description

**Number One Sunday Times Bestseller**

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 Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality.

This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – and soon a love triangle forms, which leads Charlie, Miranda and Adam to a profound moral dilemma. Can you design the perfect partner? What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives?

Provocative and moving, Machines Like Me explores whether a machine can ever truly understand the human heart.

‘Funny, thought-provoking and politically acute…’ Sunday Times

‘Dazzling’ Guardian

‘An unsettling examination of the human condition. Bold, clever’ Sunday Telegraph

Publisher Review

[McEwan's] fierce intelligence [crackles] like a Jumping Jack on Bonfire Night... Arguably the finest English writer of his generation, the ideas he explores are important, now more that ever. -- Richard Dismore * Daily Express * Compelling... unforgettably strange... there are many pleasures and many moments of profound disquiet in this book, which reminds you of its author's mastery of the underrated craft of storytelling... [Machines Like Me] is morally complex and very disturbing, animated by a spirit of sinister and intelligent mischief that feels unique to its author. -- Marcel Theroux * Guardian * Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me is a dazzling account of our interaction with technology... 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. -- Philip Womack * Independent * [Machines Like Me] is right up there with his very best [novels]. Machines Like Me manages to combine the dark acidity of McEwan's great early stories with the crowd-pleasing readability of his more recent work. A novel this smart oughtn't to be such fun, but it is. -- Alex Preston * Observer * Machines Like Me reminds us that McEwan is once-in-a-generation talent, offering readerly pleasure, cerebral incisiveness and an enticing imagination. -- Lara Feigel * Spectator *