Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home - a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse - but not with John. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.
Barb takes care of the web orders here at Boffins, and is your contact for book club enquiries. She spends all her spare time curled up on the couch reading and for the last several years has reviewed books on the Afternoon Program on ABC radio Perth.
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.
