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Sweet Tooth

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Sweet Tooth

By: Ian McEwan
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
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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
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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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Serena Frome, a beautiful student of maths and an avid reader, has an affair with a college don at Cambridge University and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. It’s 1972. Britain is in crisis, facing a three day working week, energy supplies are low and the Cold War staggers on. Serena is given a role in Sweet Tooth, MI5’s cultural attack on communism. It sounds like a dream post: she has to pretend she works for a charitable organisation that wishes to promote young writers. Her charge is Tom Haley, a short story writer who teaches at Suffolk University. Serena promises Tom a life free of financial worries, in return for a novel, which MI5 hopes will be be Orwell-esque in its satirical attack on the Eastern Block.

We learn, in detail, about Tom’s short stories, which Serena loves. After meeting Tom, she rapidly falls in love with him too. Their courtship is gilded, glowing against the grey backdrop of economic misery: courtesy of the tax payer, they sip chablis and eat oysters every weekend. It sounds literally wonderful: a literary spy novel with two beautiful, deceptive protagonists at its heart.

Sadly Sweet Tooth is rather dull. We learn in great detail about novelists in the seventies and the state of that nation as if we are reading an Economist’s guide to the era.

The food, somewhat unseventies-like, is described in incandescent detail, in comparison to the rest of the novel’s pedestrian prose. Although the novel is assuredly written and Serena is a well-thought out character, her relationship with Tom lacks life, charm, credibility. There is no emotional heart to the novel.

There is the most fantastic twist at the end of Sweet Tooth; a twist that serves to make everything that went before seem merely an introduction. It is a novel in one act, with its solitary climax.

I listened to Sweet Tooth as an audiobook whilst I was exercising: it kept me going through numerous leg lifts and arm twirls, but had I not been multi-tasking, I doubt I would have persevered. It was wonderfully and thoughtfully-read by Juliet Stevenson, which helped.

Sweet Tooth Fails to Sweeten

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