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Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot in 1948, the son of a Scottish army officer, and spent part of his childhood in Libya. His first books, the stories of First Love, Last Rites (1975) and the novel The Cement Garden (1978), in which four children hide their dead mother’s body in the cellar, earned him the nickname “Ian Macabre”. Amsterdam won the Booker Prize in 1998. Atonement (2001) turns on one summer day in 1935, when thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees something she does not understand and accuses the wrong man. His eighteenth novel, What We Can Know, published in September 2025, is set in 2119 in a partly flooded England, where an academic hunts for a poem read aloud at a party in 2014. The ten writers below share his territory: a single moment that changes lives, and the question of who gets to tell the story.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · Moral suspense · Updated October 2026
Quick answer
If you love Ian McEwan, start with Kazuo Ishiguro, whose Klara and the Sun (2021), like Machines Like Me (2019), asks whether a manufactured being can love. Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011) is, like Atonement, an old person’s reckoning with a wrong done in youth, and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart (1938) has the teenage girl and English house that came before Briony. Further down are a German novelist of divided Berlin and a writer who gives up plot almost entirely.
10 authors like Ian McEwan
Where to start if you loved Ian McEwan
If you loved Atonement, read Julian Barnes.
The Sense of an Ending: a retired man forced to reread his own past.
If you loved Machines Like Me, read Kazuo Ishiguro.
Klara and the Sun: an artificial friend and the family that buys her.
If you want the wartime London of Atonement, read Sarah Waters.
The Night Watch: four Londoners in the 1940s, told in reverse.
If you want the novel behind Atonement, read Elizabeth Bowen.
The Death of the Heart: a teenage girl, a diary and a house full of adults.
If you want more McEwan, read him across the decades.
The Cement Garden (1978) for the early dark work, Atonement (2001) for the best known, and What We Can Know (2025) for the newest.
Frequently asked questions about authors like Ian McEwan
Who writes like Ian McEwan?
Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes and Elizabeth Bowen are the closest matches. Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun pairs with Machines Like Me, Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending shares Atonement’s reckoning with a youthful wrong, and Bowen’s The Death of the Heart has the teenage girl and English house that came before Briony.
What should I read after Atonement?
Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart (1938). For the wartime chapters, try Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch (2006), and for the child who sees too much, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897).
Does Ian McEwan have a new book?
His most recent novel is What We Can Know, published in September 2025. It is set in 2119 in a partly flooded England, where an academic searches for a lost poem first read aloud at a party in 2014.
Which Ian McEwan book should I read first?
Atonement (2001) is the usual starting point. On Chesil Beach (2007) is shorter, and Amsterdam (1998) is the novel that won the Booker Prize.
Is Ian McEwan like Kazuo Ishiguro?
In some ways. They are near contemporaries who both write in a clear, controlled style about characters reckoning with what they failed to see, and both have written novels about artificial beings. McEwan relies more on plot and sudden events, Ishiguro on what his narrators leave unsaid.
Was Atonement accused of plagiarism?
In 2006 critics pointed out that passages in Atonement closely echoed Lucilla Andrews’s wartime nursing memoir No Time for Romance (1977). McEwan had acknowledged the book in his author’s note and denied plagiarism, and writers including John Updike, Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro defended him.
Sources
List last reviewed 31 October 2026.
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