Listen with Mother

Ian McEwan’s novels are drawn to enclosed spaces. There is the squash court upon which the surgeon plays a meticulously described game in Saturday, and the honeymoon suite in a little seaside hotel for the awkward newlyweds in On Chesil Beach. In Atonement, the mother is kept in her bedroom by migraines while her daughter (spoiler alert) dies in a bomb-hit Underground station, and in the famous opening to his early novel Enduring Love a child is carried away in the basket of a hot air balloon. ‘Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces,’ he writes in his new novel Nutshell, which is — oddly but perhaps logically — narrated by a foetus from inside the womb.

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‘I squat here sealed in my private life, in a lingering, sultry dusk, impatiently dreaming,’ the foetus explains; but the problem is that its life in the womb is not private at all.