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Ian McEwan´s brilliant, emotionally wrenching novel, now a major film starring Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci

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Fiona Maye, a leading High Court judge, renowned for her fierce intelligence and sensitivity is called on to try an urgent case. For religious reasons, a seventeen-year-old boy is refusing the medical treatment that could save his life. Time is running out.

She visits the boy in hospital - an encounter which stirs long-buried feelings in her and powerful new emotions in the boy. But it is Fiona who must ultimately decide whether he lives or dies and her judgement will have momentous consequences for them both.

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"Compulsively readable... McEwan´s prose keeps its cutting edge and his books are the ones the reading public still crave... A masterly balance between research and imagination... One feels an immediate pleasure in returning to prose of uncommon clarity, unshowiness and control" The Times

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