The Cement Garden

By: Ian McEwan

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

Length: 4 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

One of the world's most acclaimed novelists, New York Times best-selling author Ian McEwan has earned the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. After their parents die, four children are left alone in the family house. They are free to live however they choose, but they must preserve their terrible secret.

©1996 Ian McEwan (P)2003 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"A shocking book, morbid, full of repellant imagery, and irresistibly readable." (The New York Review of Books)
"Darkly impressive." (The Times)

Disappointing

Beware of Spoiler: Shocking ending. For me there was little redeeming value. The kids were really suffering, and the end result was incest? Shock value. It could have been ... well it’s his story to tell. But. Cheap ending I thought.

Oof

This book is disturbing as all hell. Great story. Great sense of disturbance.
The narrator was hard to get past at times. Every time he read dialogue it was quite over dramatic and silly, otherwise he did well.
Highly recommend but not for the faint of heart.

Bummed

I have almost revered Ian McEwen until now, finding his insight and erudition extremely admirable and his plots really arresting.
This book just made me writhe. I wish I had a Sci-fi forgetfulness procedure I could undergo.
In the absence of that, I worry that I will never be comfortable with I. McEwan again.
Sigh.

(Almost) unbearably dark

Deeply dark and darkly deep. Simple and chilling without going for cheap explicit shocks. Reminiscent of "Lord of the Flies" with more sex and less religion. Well narrated with a just-slightly-menacing tone, although he sounds more adult than convincingly adolescent.

an uncomfortable and painful story

I found this book uncomfortable, disquieting and painful -- and that is exactly how a reader of this book should feel. The topic of this one is agonizing. And it should be. I see that many reviewers didn't enjoy it, but I did. If a writer creates characters that inspire my empathy and compassion then I will always feel connected to the book.

This book is about four kids -- siblings who range in ages of 6 to 17. The problem is there relationships are marked by incest, which the reader encounters on page 2! They have faced the deaths of both their parents, and decided to bury her in the cellar so that they could stay together. They believed they could hide the fact that they were living together without any guardians.

The missing element here for me is backstory. I wanted to know more about the parents of these kids and how they were interacting with each other. I wanted to know why this family became what it did.

Not so happy with this one:

This book was difficult to stick with. The plot was thin at best and never really takes an interesting turn. It was predictable and flat, with characters that are not engaging. I found myself not caring what happened one way or another. I think I finished it out of sheer stubbornness...

not bad

it was ok I heard that this book was really disturbing but it didn't get really sick till the end it was a good build up to it though

Not My Favorite McEwan

I like McEwan's work much better now that he's getting out of his kinky phase.

Creepy narrator

I love Ian McEwan- in fact he is one of my favorite authors. The Cement Garden was the remaining title I’d not yet read. The narrator really threw me off, especially when he changed voices to reflect the younger character. The disappointing ending & uncomfortable subject matter just made for a creepy experience.

The Wish version of Flowers in the Attic

I got this book from a list of the most disturbing books. What I got was Flowers in the Attic if you took out all of the horror and you just had the scenes where Cathy and Chris putt around the room and eventually have sex. It had the potential to be a really disturbing book, but it turned out to be a slice of life story with some incest thrown in. The only reason I gave it two stars is because I was enjoying it thinking that something Flowers in the Attic level disturbing was going to happen. When it ended, I couldn’t believe that was it. Really lost potential.