The Child in Time
Ian McEwan
 The book is set in a dystopian near future at the end of the twentieth century. The book was written in 1987, during the time of the Thatcher government, and the British Prime Minister features in the narrative. The gender of the politician is never revealed, however. Stephen Lewis is, by his own admission, an accidental author of children's books. One Saturday, on a routine visit to the supermarket, during a concentration lapse, he loses his only daughter, Kate. Since then, the only purpose in his life is that he is a member of a committee on childcare. Otherwise he spends his days lying on the sofa drinking scotch and watching mindless TV programmes and the Olympic games. His wife, Julie, has become a recluse, and he visits her very rarely. He has a close friend, Charles Darke, who published his first novel and who is now a junior Minister in the Cabinet, and the Prime Minister's favourite. His own wife, Thelma, is a quantum physicist. She engages Stephen with her outlandish theories on time and space. However, his friends' lives are about to change irrevocably in a way he cannot understand, and he is a helpless bystander. Eventually Stephen experiences a strange event that he cannot explain: he sees his parents as a young couple in a pub, before they married. The book also deals with his grief and eventually his painful acceptance of the loss of his child.