Sweet Tooth cover art

Sweet Tooth

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 Months Free

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Get this deal
Offer ends on 15 July 2026 at 11:59 BST.
More purchase options

Sweet Tooth

By: Ian McEwan
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
Get this deal

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £10.34

Buy Now for £10.34

Ian McEwan’s mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty audiobook of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self.

Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency. The Cold War has entered a moribund phase, but the fight goes on, especially in the cultural sphere.

Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is sent on a ‘secret mission’ which brings her into the literary world of Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage – trust no one.

The Sweet Tooth audiobook is beautifully narrated by Juliet Stevenson.

 20th Century Espionage Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Spies & Politics Thriller & Suspense Fiction Witty
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1

Critic reviews

Highly entertaining
Gloriously readable and, at times, wickedly funny
Sweet Tooth takes the expectations and tropes of the Cold War thriller and ratchets up the suspense, while turning it into something else... A well-crafted pleasure to read, its smooth prose and slippery intelligence sliding down like cream
Sublime...impressive...rich and enjoyable
Riveting... Delicious... Gripping
A brilliant portrayal of 1970s Britain at its absolute worst… But it's also a gripping spy novel with some characteristic McEwan twists toward the end
A web of spying, subterfuge, deceit and betrayal... Acute, witty...winningly cunning
Playful, comic... This is a great big Russian doll of a novel, and in its construction – deft, tight, exhilaratingly immaculate – is a huge part of its pleasure...exerts a keen emotional pull
McEwan’s mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty story of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self
Fans of Ian McEwan should rejoice with the arrival of this novel... An extraordinary, irresistible work of fiction
All stars
Most relevant
Lovely story, beautifully read. Great ending.
Everything you'd expect from McEwan and Stevenson - the words and tone fit together perfectly.

Meets expectations beautifully

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
We exercise soft power in the most mundane of acts in our lives with our children, with our lovers, at work and our friends. We deceive and are deceived with small white lies, big omissions and outright deception, the manipulation and manoeuvring never really stops it is why we care about the Joneses and why the Joneses care about what we do; they are the level the measure of our and their success. Countries do the same, and no areas of society are exempt, specially what is the soft power. The Beatles created more dissidents in the Soviet Union than any political manoeuvre could, and the soviets expended billions in developing athletes to demonstrate their physical superiority; one was a fluke of history the other a planned strategy. This book is about that dance de personal and the global. Men and women fight their sexual war, and countries strategies perception by the masses, both fields use deception, lies and manipulation and sometimes we get what we asked for, sometimes we miscalculate how the smaller game affects the larger game or vice versa.
The cold war and the struggles of the period are an excellent tableau to set this story in motion. Ian McEwan makes a well thought well executed plot shine in ways few could, excellent and twisted like humanity.

The reading was good and measured.

Power and deception in all its flavours.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
For me, this was an utterly engrossing novel. Since finishing the audiobook I've read a number of reviews praising and damning it. I am very glad I hadn't read the publisher's synopsis before embarking; I find it reveals just enough that it would have ruined aspects of the narrative development for me. I enjoyed spilling from one event to the next through Juliet Stevenson's masterful narration.

Utterly engrossing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I agree with one reviewer that William Boyd does the spy stuff better - for me it was in Restless which also has a female central character. But I enjoyed the book, partly because it evoked elements of my own student days and early 20s and partly because it is, at least at the beginning, a good tale well told. I thought McEwan got inside Serena and her time very well. I also liked the artifice of the stories within the the story. But the contrived ending was a real disappointment and tainted the rest of the book for me afterwards. Brilliantly read by Juliet Stephenson.

Spoiled by the ending

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Not one of McEwan's best but still pretty good. Juliet Stevenson's voice was perfect and it was very atmospheric and kept my interest throughout. Good ending too.

quite good.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews