In a ramshackle old London house, heavily pregnant Trudy is carrying on an affair with Claude, her brother in law. The pair are plotting a way to rid themselves of John, her husband and Claude’s brother. Witness to the scene is Trudy and John’s unborn child, who is outraged at the (current and planned) treatment of his father, and plots his own revenge. I often think Ian McEwan can’t write a bad sentence, and Nutshell is no exception. It is a sharp, darkly funny rewriting of Hamlet, and at less than 200 pages, waiting to be gobbled up in an afternoon.
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