The novel is both a marathon and a rollercoaster ride, my feelings and emotions towards it went up and down.
'Lessons' is pretty long - it covers several decades of Roland Baine's life from childhood to his seventies. We get to travel through post-war Britain, the Thatcher years and pre and post-Brexit Britain. Roland also visited East Germany and later united Germany.

Roland's boarding school life is enhanced and at the same time thorn apart by his sexual relationship with the piano teacher, an event that affected his future relationships and life trajectory.
Roland's life is dealt another blow when his German wife leaves him and their baby boy to follow her dream of becoming an important writer.

Roland takes on with relative relish the sole parenting role. He does what needs doing, making sure his boy is well looked after and knows he's loved.

McEwan deftly moves through time and to different characters' lives. Major historical events are referenced, some were more affecting than others.

Regrets, lost opportunities, relationships, and ageing are some of the major themes of this sprawling novel. Chance, family secrets, memory and history feature greatly as well. The last part covering the later part of Roland's life was quite sad. As they say, getting old is not for the faint of heart.

'Lessons' is a topical novel, with many references to authors and writing, that I couldn't help but feel were McEwan's own views on certain things. The novel could have been tighter, certain aspects and passages weren't that interesting and didn't add that much to Roland's story.

As far as the audiobook production is concerned, I confess I wasn't very fond of the narrator's delivery. I eventually got used to Simon McBurney's voice, I would have preferred a softer, less dramatic reading.

Lessons by Ian McEwan is a sprawling saga of one man’s life, delving into each important era of his existence. This novel begins in the 1940s and delivers the reader all the way to 2021.

Roland begins as a child who goes to boarding school at age 11, there he begins piano lessons with Ms. Miriam Cornell. There is instantly a sexual tension, even Roland can tell at his tender age. He is transferred to another piano instructor, but Ms. Cornell reinserts herself into his life for several years. What follows in piecemeal reflections throughout the novel is an illicit affair and disturbing grooming of Roland.

As we see, but takes Roland much longer to realize, this trauma of grooming impacts all of his close relationships. McEwan shows us the pain of failed marriage, raising a son alone, and experiencing the joy and grief of finding and losing love at an older age.

My criticism of Lessons is that we feel little connection to any character until a quarter into the novel, quite a significant chunk of this 500 page book. However, that time is spent building a critical subplot- the impact of WWII on everyone in its generation and those that follow. As a child and adult tied to both England and Germany, this context was important.

Overall, this is a literary biography of sorts. I felt deeply for Roland as the story went by and now I will miss him. Additionally the narration of the audiobook was fantastic, adding to the richness of this beautiful novel. Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media for the ALC in exchange for my honest review.

DNFed at 10%

I don't think I should even be giving a review considering how early on I dnfed it, but here we are.

The little of the book that I read seemed so impersonal and cold. It's told from the third person and is character driven, but I felt there was too little emotion of the main character considering that it is character driven.

I might be wrong, of course. Again, I read just the tiniest part of it.

It also felt too.... unorganized. In Serbian we say something along the lines of "from the hills, from the valley", and I thought exactly that of what I read. Like the author couldn't decide where he was coming from or where he was going with this.

I'm not familiar with this author, but I can see how well loved and respected his work is, so I'm not sure if his writing is not for me or if this book just didn't touch me enough to make me want to know more.

For seven decades, we intimately follow Roland Baines through his life. From his awkward abandonment at a boarding school 2000 miles from home at 11 years old, through his relationships, ranging from toxic abuse to desertion by his wife and mother to his son, Roland struggles to reach the peaks that his young self considered easy goals.

McEwan reveals Roland through his daily activities, his aimless fumbling through monumental world events, his thoughts and conversations. Roland’s passivity, as he unveils shocking events in his life that he barely processes, is intoxicating to read. It is like meeting some low key friends for wine and conversation in a quiet
tavern on a gray afternoon. And, softly, slowly, absolute bombshells of disclosures are discussed as the wine flows.

I love/hate Roland. But I love/love his story. Lessons is pure McEwan, abundant with grace and charm, art and depth, war and history, with intimately dissected relationships and repressed emotion.

I’m always curious to see what Ian McEwan is up to in his writing because I have found so many of his works to be both so vastly different and so very satisfying to me. Lessons was no different. It’s a sprawling tale, more so than anything else of his that I’ve read, but I enjoyed the journey through the 20th century and into almost the present moment with a small cast of characters that are drawn quite vividly. Though I’m no McEwan expert, I think what he does most effectively is linger in a moment for what feels like eons of time but also no time at all that mimics real thought and memory. I was glad to see this happening again in Lessons, a story that moves regularly from past to present because of little triggers of memory. I don’t know of other writers that make these moves so fluidly or linger in them so luxuriously as McEwan does, but I revel in reading it because of the unpredictable journey. This was the first time I’ve read one of his books on audio and found this to be an even more fun experience in that format because I was along for the ride to a greater extent than I am on the page. Lessons will leave me thinking.

"Lessons" is essentially a coming-of-age story. That may sound odd, as we encounter the protagonist, Roland, at many points throughout his long life--not just in his youth--but he continues to evolve and grow at every stage. He is an erudite and thoughtful guide through the period spanning from WWII to the Covid Pandemic. The intersection of his life (and the lives of his family and friends) with major world events, however intentional or accidental, is captivating. Yet, in many respects, this is a character study of a quiet man who often wonders what he has done with his life. He is constantly thinking about his life, evaluating the decisions he has made and carefully contemplating the direction he seeks to take in the future. There are many disturbing events and Roland's life often seems to veer suddenly off course, yet he hangs on and makes it through with grace. I am a longtime fan of Ian McEwan and looked forward to this book; to say that it did not disappoint is an understatement. Although quite long, I loved every minute, and when the audiobook narrator said, "the end," I sat in silence thinking about Roland's life for a little while longer. I highly recommend this thoughtful and compelling book. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to review the beautifully-narrated audiobook.

I wanted, so badly, to love this book - Ian McEwan is a legend in his own right. But it was a swing and a miss. Way too long, so much unnecessary droning. Do you want to focus on every. single. historical event that took place in almost a century, or Roland’s (inappropriate and emotionally damaging) sexual awakening? Pick a lane. You know what this gave me? Holden Caulfield. Catcher in the Rye. Which I also hated.

This could’ve been great if it had been edited with a heavier hand, or if we had been given more as to what it actually FELT like to live through some of these massively historical events. But if you’re just going to touch on them superficially, then don’t include them at all - spare us hundreds of pages (or hours).

As for the narration, Simon McBurney lacked any inflection whatsoever (honestly, fitting the tone of the novel, so can you really blame him?). He read straight through all 17.5 hrs of this book like a steam train, making it nearly impossible to keep track of what year it was, what character was being focused on, or where they were in the world - so at some point I just gave up and let my mind wander.

All this to say, this epic novel was not for me. Thank you NetGalley and RB Media for the free audiobook in exchange for my honest review.

I have mixed feelings about the latest Ian McEwan.

‘Lessons’ is the life story of Roland Baines, from his youth in Libya in the 1950s to old age in the 2020s. The women in his life are at the heart of this novel and the parts describing these relationships are the strongest in my opinion. For instance, there is the (for the reader extremely uncomfortable) sexual relationship Roland has with his piano teacher when he is only 14, which has an enduring impact on Roland’s life (and reminded me of On Chesil Beach, Atonement and Enduring Love). And years later there is his wife that suddenly leaves Roland and their 7-month old baby.

The human insights, into ageing, into life choices, are the novel’s strongest part and I wish he had limited himself to that. Unfortunately however, there is the constant need to connect the episodes in Roland’s life with the sweeping historical developments of the age, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Chernobyl to Brexit to Covid. Not only did I not learn much from the rather banal observations on these events, they also make the novel long and the tone pedantic (although on this last point I may have been influenced here by the know-it-all tone of the narrator of the audio-version).

The reading experience reminded me a bit of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart: another endless novel the point of which is still largely unclear to me but which was somehow enjoyable enough to keep reading. Here, the writing is better and often enough there are beautiful nuggets and atmospheric scenes, a lot of them set in Germany, that made me nostalgic for my favourite McEwans…this is not one of those, but a good read nevertheless.

3,5 rounded up.

✨Book Review✨

Thank you to @netgalley and @recordedbooks and @aaknopf for the eARC and ALC.

I really enjoyed Atonement, so I was looking forward to Lessons!

This book includes the lifelong story of one man, Roland Baines. This book encompasses so much, including all the major world events along the line of Baines’ life. Not to mention all the unique experiences that make Roland Baines himself.

I’ll admit that it was a bit unsettling to read about Roland being taken advantage of, sexually, by his piano teacher…while I was waiting for my own son to complete his weekly piano lesson. 😬🎹

I loved the narrator and his accent were perfect for this book! I definitely preferred the audio of this book compared to reading it in print.

This is going to be one of those books that some people scream from the rooftops and others will probably hate because it is an epic tome of a book. I’m somewhere in between. I can appreciate the writing and that there was some major points made, but overall it was…fine. 🤷🏼‍♀️

If you like huge, epic novels that explore tons of ideas and topics, then I’d recommend this one. Otherwise, I might say wait and see what your other reader friends think of it. It’ll be hit or miss.

I was very excited to read Ian McEwan's latest novel, Lessons, and even more excited when I saw how long it was (around 500 pages - I love a thick book). Unfortunately, and I say this with a heavy heart, reading Lessons became almost a chore for me, one that I didn't like, and I decided to DNF it at 30% (this is the second book I don't finish in my LIFE, so I really tried).

Roland was sexually abused by a teacher when he was 11. Now adult (in 1986), his wife left him with a baby without an explanation. Pretty interesting so far. Then a sort of stream of consciousness starts, where Roland remembers different parts of his life, when he met his wife, his parents in law, all this mixed with European history... On paper this book seems exactly my cup of team, but in reality I never got to know who Roland was, he always seemed very far away and therefore I quickly lost interest. The writing is beautiful, but also quite heavy and didn't make me connect with the story, sadly. I'm sure this is not a case of bad book, it wasn't simply for me / for me right now. Maybe in the future I'll give Lessons a second chance and change my mind.

Audiobook comment: absolutely loved the voice of the narrator, truly a pleasure to listen to! Unfortunately it was not enough, as I struggled paying attention to the story. That's too bad!

* I'd like to thank the author, Knopf Doubleday and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Anther masterpiece from great author, Ian McEwan. Through Roland’s life Ian McEwan reflect all the important moments from the Cuban crisis, different wars, the fall of the Breslin Wall, the twin towers, and all Roland goes through, his family, his dreams, his secrets, his marriage, his friends, his son and how everything that happens to us, shapes what we become. The audiobook is great.

Lessons, by Ian McEwan, is a passionate, unsettling and intellectually risky story about love and loss. Roland Baines, a young boy growing up in England during the Cold War, ends up at a boarding school 2,000 miles away from his mother after she mysteriously disappears. Miss Miriam Cornell, his piano teacher, notices his frailty and the two quickly become romantically involved. Their relationship, however, is ended prematurely by Miss Cornell's early demise. When Roland's wife goes missing years later, he is constrained to confront the scalding reality of his restless existence. As he begins to uncover the secrets of his family history, he realizes that Lessons never truly end.

This beautifully written book is full of both heartbreak and hope. It's a moving story about the power of love and how it can transcend time and distance. Roland is a sympathetic character who goes through a lot of heartbreak but never loses faith in the possibility of happiness. The story is set against the backdrop of historical events, which adds depth and resonance. Lessons is a haunting and memorable novel that will linger with you long after you've finished it. This is, in my biased opinion, McEwan's most ambitious work, which he executed brilliantly.

It comes with the highest recommendation from me. This will be out on September 13th, 2022. Add this to your TBR.

Audiobook rating: The voice of the narrator is terrific and complements the narrative immaculately.

Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media, Recorded Books for the Audio-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

link to Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cicy4Q4r7-s/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
link to Goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4947032544?type=review#rating_508402603

Lessons by Ian McEwan Narrated by: Simon McBurney. I found this book like marmite! You either love it or hate it However, I didn't love it but the narrators voice made me love it and he had a lot to do with it!!!! His voice was beautiful and Just perfect for this book. If I had to read Lessons I think I would of given up at the beginning.

This book is about a gentleman called Roland Baines and he takes us through his life; all his relationships, and especially his relationship with wife Ingrid and his son Roland. Various historical events, World War II, the Suez Canal, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Brexit and the recent pandemic of Covid etc.

This book is full of historical advents that has happened which made it an interesting read or audiobook. However, and Be-warned it is 17 hrs and 34 mins long. But, great to listen to when you are revamping some old furniture in the garden whilst catching some autumn sun rays on you back and face.

Big Thank you to NetGalley, for a free copy of this book in exchange for my fair and honest opinion.

This one was sad and slow. I should have read this book instead of attempting on audio. It was this line, "Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life."

Lessons is the eighteenth novel by Booker prize-winning British author, Ian McEwan. The audio version is narrated by Simon McBurney. At the age of eleven, after living for five years with his parents in Libya, Roland Baines is sent to Berners Hall, a boarding school in rural Suffolk, to get the education his parents missed out on. His father had always wanted to play the piano: Roland is signed up for lessons with Miss Miriam Cornell.

When Roland is thirty-seven, his wife abandons him and their baby son, claiming in a note that, while she loves him, motherhood would sink her, and she’s been living the “wrong life”. Now a published poet, Roland has to seek social service assistance as sole carer for seven-month-old Lawrence.

As he copes with sole parenthood and the threat of a radiation cloud from Chernobyl, he is also under suspicion for murder from DI Douglas Browne, who is sceptical of the note and postcards Alissa has sent.

Plagued by sleeplessness, Roland’s mind goes back to his childhood: army accommodation in Tripoli, boarding school, lessons with Miss Cornell, and the highly inappropriate affair into which she grooms a pre-teen boy. While the prospect of an older, attractive, single and erotically-inclined lover might be a dream come true for a randy sixteen-year-old schoolboy, even bedazzled, Roland understands it could be the destruction of his future.

In eventually rejecting her, he also abandons his formal education, spends a rather dissolute decade travelling, then begins to educate himself. By his mid-forties, he is coaching tennis, writing reviews and playing tearoom piano. “How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.”

Some of McEwan’s descriptive prose is exquisite: “He knew that her mind was elsewhere and that he bored her with his insignificance – another inky boy in a boarding school. His fingers were pressing down on the tuneless keys. He could see the bad place on the page before he reached it, it was happening before it happened, the mistake was coming towards him, arms outstretched like a mother, ready to scoop him up, always the same mistake coming to collect him without the promise of a kiss. And so it happened. His thumb had its own life. Together, they listened to the bad notes fade into the hissing silence.”

But, at times, he seems to go off on tangents from his main plot, and although patience with these apparent digressions does offer the reader a fuller backstory, his lofty prose and cerebral subject matter can be enough to make the ordinary reader feel uneducated, even dumb. His protagonist is not all that likeable, making it hard for the reader to care a whole lot about his fate until, in the final pages, he develops into a more appealing character.

With references to national, European and world events, McEwan certainly establishes the era and setting, but his protagonist’s opinions on, and reactions to, politics and current affairs do begin to bore, and readers will be tempted to skim. A too-detailed description of a mediocre life that is much wordier than it needs to be.
This unbiased review is from an audio copy provided by NetGalley and RB Media.

A new Ian McEwan book always feels like an event. He has written many of my favorite novels and his words often seem like magic on the page. Lessons covers a huge amount of time and historical events, from WWII to the present day and the pandemic. I enjoyed reading about the relationships in the book, but the story itself felt tedious and longwinded. I alternated between the print and audio versions and found myself struggling to keep up with what was going on at times. This one did not work for me, but kudos to the beautiful cover art and the narrator was excellent.

Thank you to RB Media and NetGalley for this ARC.

ian mcewan’s latest novel is definitely a treat for those into quiet, character-driven stories. the audiobook (superbly narrated by simon mcburney) is a little over seventeen hours long; while it is quite a lengthy story, mcewan manages to pull it off with an exquisite writing and a deep meditation on the consequences of childhood abuse, parenthood and the cyclic nature of life, with world war 2 looming in the background as a recurrent theme even though the novel spans through the second half of the twentieth century.

now, this isn’t just roland baines’s story, but rather an account of his life and that of those surrounding him. one of my favourite moments in the entire novel, which did happen fairly on, was the account of his mother-in-law’s life, and her ever-growing obsession with the white rose resistance group in post-war munich. mcewan tackled the subject with plenty of respect but also quite critically, meditating on how the major events in history shape us as human individuals, as well as our relationships with others — in roland’s case, with his wife and son, but also with his parents, his half-siblings, and most importantly with the woman who groomed him as a teenager.

i also loved roland’s relationship with alissa, told largely in flashbacks with kramer vs. kramer-esque tone. roland navigates being a single father and having been abandoned by his wife against the backdrop of the chernobyl nuclear crisis; alissa, on the other hand, grapples with a very complex relationship with motherhood, which is very delicately explored by mcewan. the reasons of her departure, and the way roland eventually finds out about them, were well explained and executed, and i really liked the little snapshots from the moments when they first met. i’m not going to get into the way things went for her towards the end of the novel, because i’m still figuring out how i feel about it, but i think i understand mcewan’s point of view, even though i do wish it would have been a little less stereotypical — there were a couple of things that made me roll my eyes, but well, i’m willing to forgive them because i really enjoyed the rest of the book. also, roland as a character handled it in a very nice way, so i guess that makes up for the predictable-ish outcome of that storyline.

the central point to the novel, however, is the abuse that roland suffered back in school, when he was groomed by his piano teacher, ms cornell. she first molests him at age eleven, then eventually invites him over to her house shortly after he turns fourteen; their relationship is framed as blatantly abusive from the very beginning, but roland seems to regard it as a sort of rite passage into adulthood. this idea bothered me at first, because i couldn’t understand why their “relationship” would be framed in such a way. but then i understood that this was just roland’s perspective as a teenager, attempting to explain to himself what was going on. ms cornell’s abuse shaped pretty much the rest of his life — he dropped out of school before the sixth form, then became an autodidact in the late twenties, which eventually led to him meeting his wife. roland then looks back on his first sexual relationship and quietly dissects it, coming to terms with the nature of what happened back then and how it shaped his relationship with the women that later came into his life. i think mcewan’s approach was very nuanced and interesting, although my only (minor) complaint is that i wish he hadn’t delved that much into the more sexual aspects of their relationship. i do get that it needed to be depicted, and that it’s meant to make you feel uncomfortable, but i think it took up too much in terms of pacing. still, it was interesting to reflect about it in retrospect, not unlike roland does as an adult — although he refers to it in such terms, it is hard to see his relationship with cornell as a “sentimental education”, particularly by today’s standards, and i think mcewan handled it in a very thoughtful way, both delving into roland’s experience as a teenager and his later thoughts on the matter when he got older.

overall, i really enjoyed this one. mcewan’s prose is always solid, but i think he outdid himself here in terms of character development — roland isn’t an exactly likeable character from the very beginning, particularly as an adult, but i did pity him and eventually root for him, his son and other minor characters. this is the first time i’ve managed to complete an audiobook (yay!) and even though i don’t feel like it’s a format that i’ll stick to, i’m glad this one worked for me.

i received a copy of this audiobook from netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I think this is an example of an author who knows all the things he needs to do to write a good book, but has lost the skills to deliver it. This book was poor.

Roland is sexually abused by a teacher and this is never resolved, the consequences of this on Roland, I can tell McEwan has considered them, but he's not communicated them, it's almost painful when he probes himself on this later in the novel, because Roland doesn't know what he thinks and it's left with a very apologist feel.

There is endless rubbish about the history of Europe and political history, which is a core of the book, but it frankly boring and doesn't add, it's poorly executed and this takes away from the student teacher relationship which is far more interesting.

Bad book, skip this McEwan and catch up on his backlist instead - 2 stars.

I appreciate Ian McEwan's ambition to write his longest work yet after more than 15 novels.
At times, this ambition feels not just professional, but personal. Like there is a need for the author to share... something. And "Lessons" shines the best in those confessional moments, even if at times it is hard not to be confused about what parts of the story are the important ones.

However, "Lessons" ambitions are also professional. Ian McEwan tries to tell a story that includes every important political event from The Second World War until the present and that part doesn't work.

When Roland was 11 his piano teacher, a woman, molested him, altering his life in indiscernible ways, even when looked upon by him at a much older age. For much of it is essentially a dual timeline story at the point of which is wife has left him with their son and his story from 11 old is told until it catches up. It didn’t feel completely strict on audio, more as though certain moments would suddenly dovetail into boyhood.

And then are (annoyingly) ruminated upon as he gets further old. I’m sure it’s helpful for some readers to get a refresher; it is a fairly long novel. I would have rather just had his story purely linear and Bildungsroman, womb to tomb. It is intentionally overwritten, which works for it in some instances. There is so much detail on many things, I imagine only some will be of interest, not all.

It did work for me that in retrospect, Roland, in going through his journals, finds no specific themes or flourishes of writing; he’s exceptional at a thing or two and not much else. He is very ordinary and his story still is worth reading about and knowing. But I have to agree that it isn’t exceptional above and beyond the amount of detail summoned to ink the character and bring his life to the page. He was always believable and easy to empathize with and understand. So much verisimilitude present must connect the reader to something they care about, I think. Especially with prose work that are quite good.

There’s a lot to like, nothing extraordinary about the novel, for me.except for narration, which was impeccable. Highly recommend the audiobook format for this one.