Following a celebrated career spanning decades as a world-renowned novelist, Ian McEwan is releasing his collected nonfiction writings in a full-length volume.
The publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced on Wednesday that the essay and speech collection, titled Between Books, will arrive next spring on 25 May. This marks the first major nonfiction work from the author of Atonement, The Innocent, and the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam, alongside numerous other novels. The British writer previously brought out a short nonfiction piece, Science, in 2019.
According to Knopf, the volume ranges from "intimate personal recollection to bold intellectual enquiry," combining previously published pieces with unreleased work, alongside a newly written introduction by McEwan.
In a statement, Knopf Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Jordan Pavlin described the title: "'Between Books' is an intimate record of a great mind wrestling with the contours of his own life and all the themes and questions that inform his masterworks: the nature of truth and love, the human hunger for meaning and knowledge, the mysteries of the soul."
Discussing his upcoming release, the 78-year-old author stated that he "started out contemplating a ragbag of disparate pieces and ended up with what I hope is an emotional and intellectual journey."
McEwan’s last book, What We Know, released in 2025, was described as "science fiction without the science," set over a century in the future within a much-changed and partly-submerged UK.
Born in Aldershot in 1948, the son of an army NCO who was wounded at Dunkirk. He studied at the Universities of Sussex and East Anglia.
His acclaimed collections of stories First Love Last Rites and In Between the Sheets (1975/77) were followed by the novels The Cement Garden (1978), The Comfort of Strangers (1981), The Child in Time (1987), The Innocent (1990), Black Dogs (1992), Enduring Love (1997) and the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam (1998).
Atonement (2001) won the WH Smith Literary Award and the US National Book Critics' Circle Award.
