The Cement Garden

By: Ian McEwan

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

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)

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.

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.

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.

The concrete garden

The story is poor, the characters are flat and it’s predictable. It might the time the story was written.

(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.