The Children Act
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Narrated by:
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Lindsay Duncan
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By:
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Ian McEwan
About this listen
A brilliant, emotionally wrenching new novel from the author of Atonement and Amsterdam.
Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child's welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts. But Fiona's professional success belies domestic strife. Her husband, Jack, asks her to consider an open marriage and, after an argument, moves out of their house. His departure leaves her adrift, wondering whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability; whether it was not contempt and ostracism she really fears.
She decides to throw herself into her work, especially a complex case involving a 17-year-old boy whose parents will not permit a lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with their beliefs as Jehovah's Witnesses. But Jack doesn't leave her thoughts, and the pressure to resolve the case - as well as her crumbling marriage - tests Fiona in ways that will keep listeners thoroughly enthralled until the last stunning page.
©2014 Ian McEwan (P)2014 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Claire Harwell hasn't settled into grief; events haven't let her. Cool, eloquent, raising two fatherless children, Claire has emerged as the most visible of the 9/11 widows who became a potent political force in the aftermath of the catastrophe. She longs for her husband, but she has found her mission: she sits on a jury charged with selecting a fitting memorial for the victims of the attack.
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Some books were meant to be read...
- By Barbara on 02-24-12
By: Amy Waldman
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Now, Voyager
- Femmes Fatales
- By: Olive Higgins Prouty
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Boston blueblood Charlotte Vale has led an unhappy, sheltered life. Lonely, dowdy, repressed, and pushing 40, Charlotte finds salvation at a sanitarium, where she undergoes an emotional and physical transformation. After her extreme makeover, the new Charlotte tests her mettle by embarking on a cruise and finds herself in a torrid love affair with a married man which ends at the conclusion of the voyage. But only then can the real journey begin, as Charlotte is forced to navigate a new life for herself.
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The Inspiration for The Movie Classic
- By Susie on 12-17-12
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A Great Deliverance
- Inspector Lynley, Book 1
- By: Elizabeth George
- Narrated by: Donada Peters
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton. Along with the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lynley has been sent to solve a savage murder that has stunned the peaceful countryside. For fat, unlovely Roberta Teys has been found in her best dress, an ax in her lap, seated in the old stone barn beside her father's headless corpse. Her first and last words were "I did it. And I'm not sorry".
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good debut novel
- By Stevon on 11-11-19
By: Elizabeth George
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Rumpole of the Bailey [AudioGo]
- By: John Mortimer
- Narrated by: Robert Hardy
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In these witty and comic stories, Horace Rumpole takes on a variety of clients and activities. He, of course, brings each case to a successful end, all the while quoting poetry and drinking claret.
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Wordsworth in a Wig
- By Ian C Robertson on 04-27-13
By: John Mortimer
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Millard Salter's Last Day
- By: Jacob M. Appel
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In an effort to delay the frailty and isolation that comes with old age, psychiatrist Millard Salter decides to kill himself by the end of the day - but first he has to tie up some loose ends. These include a tête-à-tête with his youngest son, Lysander, who at 43 has yet to hold down a paying job; an unscheduled rendezvous with his first wife, Carol, whom he hasn't seen in 27 years; and a brief visit to the grave of his second wife, Isabelle. Complicating this plan, though, is Delilah, the widow with whom he has fallen in love in the past few months.
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great storytelling....
- By Anna Marie Bair on 01-18-20
By: Jacob M. Appel
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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The Schooldays of Jesus
- By: J. M. Coetzee
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog, Bolivar, to watch over him. But he'll be seven soon, and he should be at school. And so, with the guidance of the three sisters who own the farm where Simon and Ines work, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky.
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SEXUAL PERVERSION PRESENTED AS BRILLIANT
- By Amazon Customer on 09-29-18
By: J. M. Coetzee
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Asylum
- By: Patrick McGrath
- Narrated by: Sir Ian McKellen
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting - a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues -a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.
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So enjoyed this book!
- By Mebythesea on 10-07-08
By: Patrick McGrath
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Accident of Birth
- By: Heather Neff
- Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor
- Length: 13 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Reba Freeman has loved two men in her life. Her current husband, Carl, has supported her through their 20-year marriage and given her all the material wealth a suburban wife could hope for. Reba is comfortable, if not necessarily content, in her life with Carl and their blossoming teenage daughter, Marisa, until she learns that her first love and first husband, Joseph Thomas, has been detained by the World Court of Human Rights.
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Good Listen
- By Tricia on 02-24-08
By: Heather Neff
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An Available Man
- A Novel
- By: Hilma Wolitzer
- Narrated by: Fred Sullivan
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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When Edward Schuyler - a modest and bookish 62-year-old science teacher - is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. There are plenty of unattached women around, but a healthy, handsome, available man is a rare and desirable creature. Edward receives phone calls from widows seeking love, or at least lunch, while well-meaning friends try to set him up at dinner parties. The problem is that Edward doesn’t feel available. He’s still mourning his beloved wife, Bee, and prefers solitude and the familiar routine of work, gardening, and bird-watching.
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Lovely book, easy read, wonderful characters
- By Molly-o on 02-17-12
By: Hilma Wolitzer
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Very disappointed.
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Narrator Simon McBurney gets my 100% rating
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Very disappointed.
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One of his best
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What a disappointment
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Make something, and die.
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Not McEwan's Best Effort
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Internationally best-selling author and Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan presents his first book for children, The Daydreamer. Peter Fortune is unlike most kids his age. In fact, he's different from everybody else in the world. Peter has the amazing ability to make his daydreams come true. A captivating narration from Simon Prebble brings McEwan's imaginative and adventurous story to vivid life for listeners of all ages.
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Charming and Sweet!!!
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An excellent parody on life during Brexit
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Mysterious, bizarre
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Quick and engaging, well-read
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It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come.
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One of the best new novels in recent years
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Warlight
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Overall
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In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself - shadowed and luminous at once - we follow the story of 14-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war.
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It both entertains and teaches.
- By Kelly on 07-28-18
By: Michael Ondaatje
What listeners say about The Children Act
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Performance
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Story
- Ilana
- 10-19-14
Far-Reaching Consequences
Fiona Maye is a British judge assigned to child welfare cases. One of her more recent cases has involved deciding against the parents of conjoined siamese twins who shared vital organs. One of the twins had chances of surviving if the twins were separated, while the other was sure to die. If they were not separated, both would have died. The parents wanted to let God and nature take their course. Fiona made the decision to let the stronger twin have a chance at life. Fiona's difficult professional life has had repercussions on her long-term marriage. Now nearing sixty, she no longer craves intimacy with her husband after all the accumulated stress. Her husband on the other hand decides what he needs is one last grand passion and wants to have his cake and eat it too, so tells Fiona he'd like to have an affair with a young woman, yet keep the marriage intact, which doesn't suit Fiona in the least.
Then another complicated case falls in her lap. A young Jehova's Witness, not yet eighteen years old, the age of medical consent in England, is urgently in need of blood transfusions. The hospital has made an appeal to the court, as without the transfusions, the leukemia he suffers from is bound to kill him in a painful way. Both the parents and Adam, the young man himself, are against the procedure on religious grounds, though the parents ultimately leave the choice in Adam's hands. For reasons she doesn't quite understand herself, Fiona feels compelled to make the trip to the hospital and meet Adam in person to see what should be done, and eventually persuades him to go through with the procedure. The consequences will have far-reaching consequences.
This was a very good book and ultimately seemed to me more about relationships and the impact individuals have upon each other than about medical and legal issues, which ultimately, was much more interesting to me. Excellent narration by Lindsay Duncan—I would gladly listen to more audiobooks read by her.
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12 people found this helpful
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- BHL
- 10-13-14
Satisfying and Compact
Fiona is in the driver's seat of both her personal and professional lives but she is also aging and world weary. She is a highly respected judge, beloved wife and accomplished musician, but is also selfish and self-absorbed, and at times not very likeable at all. Fiona skirts oblivion, however, as her husband throws down the gauntlet hoping to shake her from her malaise at the same time a young man at the center of a life or death legal judgment stirs her humanity. It is her enlightened understanding of these relationships that utimately restores the balance at the convergence of the personal and professional. The story satisfies in the end, but that end, we know, is still only a respite somewhere on a bittersweet and ambiguous road.
Ian McEwan got it right this time. The Children Act is a novella really, short and tightly structured, and introspective and private, like a good piece of chamber music. Lindsay Duncan, the narrator, does a nice, unobtrusive job.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Lisa
- 11-06-16
Parts were really good
I would have given a higher rating if the story was just about the child that needed treatment, but the parents refused treatment based on religious beliefs. That part was well written and interesting. Unfortunately the rest of the story is based on the story of the judge and I found it tedious and boring. I think it is worth reading, but not the best book ever.
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1 person found this helpful
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- E F
- 04-25-16
Two sad people, a court and a hospital
I enjoyed listening to this story, it kept my attention and was worth my time. The author tells of a remote, chilly and professional judge touched by a passionate young man's misfortunes. The narration is good and adds to the story.
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- JayDC
- 01-25-17
Powerful, devastating, lovely
Haunting story and beautiful use of language. Lindsay Duncan's narration was perfect - she brought the story to life.
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- J. Dionne
- 04-24-16
Beautiful
This book jabs, lingers, touches deeply, plays on a multitude of emotions. It is a work of art. I could listen over and over and get lost in the words. Caracter development is superb. A short, tightly woven, profound book.
Made my top 5.
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- Latin Bunny
- 09-28-16
wonderfully written
so well written, it draws you in. really enjoyed it despite the delicate topics covered.
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- Cathie Dalziel
- 12-29-16
Subtle shivers
I loved it. This will definitely be one that I will return to again (and I usually don't do re-reads).
Lindsay Duncan does a fantastic job narrating The Children's Act.
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- Bonny
- 09-17-14
McEwan has written perfection in this novel.
Thank you, Ian McEwan, for writing exactly the book I've looked forward to for many months. Rationalism, science, biology, logic, law, and the absence of unnecessary drama and hyperbole are all things I prize in life, and it was a real pleasure to have them written so incredibly well in the character of Fiona Maye in The Children Act. Fiona is an English High Court judge in the Family Division who must decide the fate of Adam Henry, a 17-year-old Jehovah's Witness who has leukemia and is refusing a life-saving transfusion. Fiona is also dealing with a crisis in her personal life; her husband Jack has announced to her that “I love you, but before I drop dead, I want one big passionate affair.”
Some of the best parts of The Children Act are the beautifully reasoned details of several of Fiona's decisions. In her judgements, she tries to bring “reasonableness to hopeless situations.” Her decision in Adam's case has consequences that affect Fiona's personal life, and part of the miracle of this book is that McEwan writes this human drama without TV movie dramatics or bashing of religious beliefs. This is the first book I've read by Ian McEwan, and I'll approach some of his other books with a bit of trepidation, but The Children Act is about as close to perfection in a novel as I've ever read.
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- Joe Kraus
- 10-09-16
One of the Best at His Best: Justice vs. Love
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I’m used to juxtaposing justice with mercy. That’s the conventional formula. In this, utterly skillful novel, McEwan changes the equation slightly so that justice finds itself in competition with love. It’s two of the cardinal virtues weighed against each other through the experiences of the all-too human Fiona Maye, a British family court judge known for her brilliant decisions. She takes as paramount the central claim of the decree referenced in the title – the Children Act – that the welfare of a child should always be paramount in any legal deliberation.
Before the novel begins, Fiona’s life has a kind of perfection to it. She is an acclaimed jurist, and her husband, an energetic classics professor, seems like her ideal match. The two are equally accomplished, and they’ve built a comfortable life together. It turns out it’s too comfortable, though, when her husband announces he intends to have an affair with a younger woman. He seems to be telling her in advance, asking for a kind of permission or shocking her into renewed passion in their marriage. As it is, he tells her, all marriages aspire to condition of siblinghood, and he feels more like a brother to her than a husband.
At the same time as her marriage crumbles, she finds herself with a challenging case: a 17 years and three months old boy has leukemia. He’s from a family of Jehova’s Witnesses, so they refuse medical treatment for him. Once Adam reaches 18, he can make the decision himself, but until then Fiona has to weigh the competing claims. She chooses a kind of powerful justice, one that flies in the face of religious absolutism but that takes faith seriously as a reasonable motive.
What follows is complicated, and I don’t want to risk a [SPOILER] without warning. Fiona, acting as dispassionately as she can under her personal emotional turmoil, inadvertently unleashes the demand for love from the Adam. He sees her as someone who has allowed him to glimpse a wider, more cosmopolitan world, and he wants her to play a kind of mother figure to him. Fiona and her husband have never had children, though – a decision incidental to her commitment to her judicial career – and, in the wake of their break-up and clumsy reunion, she feels her childlessness like never before. In one of the many superb passages of the book, she imagines how the children they might have had would have reacted: they’d have gathered around the kitchen table, trying to talk sense into dad and trying to make mom realize she bore some of the blame. It’s a seemingly effortless sketch, yet it packs the wallop of some entire novels. It’s a cry for the love she gave up in order to serve justice as she has.
As the novel nears its end, Fiona realizes with ever greater clarity that she cannot love without sacrificing something of justice. Whether it means forgiving her husband (and, implicitly, forgoing her righteous sense of betrayal) or being present for Adam and compromising her role as a judge, she simply cannot contain both virtues simultaneously.
You know you’re in capable hands from the moment you read the opening pages. I think I read McEwan’s Atonement 20 or so years ago, around the time it came out, and even though I’ve forgotten the particulars of the book, I found a familiar excellence of skill as soon as I started reading this. McEwan writes with true clarity: a clarity not just of language and character, but of moral terminology as well. You know right away that this is about something, that it isn’t merely a story of interesting characters (though it is that as well).
The final scene here is nothing short of a masterpiece. It carries the same emotional weight (and, I’d insist, speaks indirectly to) the climax of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” I don’t make that comparison lightly: McEwan may not be quite as efficient here as Joyce is there, but the result is that good. Two flawed humans realize how small they are beside the weight of others’ passions, but they realize as well some of their capacity to lighten each other’s burden, to offer love as a salve to the necessary weakness of all of us.
I might have wished for a little more consistency from Adam as a character (there is a little convenience to the way his passions swing back and forth), but it’s hard to imagine any other fault in this one. I knew of McEwan as one of the world’s great living writers before I picked this up. Reputation confirmed.
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