It, in many ways, encompasses a lot of the rhythms and events that are familiar to a lot of us – childhood events that stick with us, significant relationships, changing family dynamics, discoveries about who we are, ageing. On the one hand, this is the story of the life of one man, Roland Baines. It’s not every day that I’m given the opportunity to review such a big book! Big name author, huge topic and literally quite massive – nearly 500 pages. ‘The supreme novelist of his generation’ Sunday Times Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we learn from the traumas of the past? Then, in his final years, he finds love again in another form. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means – literature, travel, friendship, drugs, sex and politics. As the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster 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.įrom the Suez and Cuban Missile crises, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Covid pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history but more often struggles against it. He is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence. Twenty-five years later Roland’s wife mysteriously vanishes, leaving him alone with their baby son. When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines’s life is turned upside down.Ģ,000 miles from his mother’s protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Epic, mesmerising and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times – a powerful meditation on history and humanity told through the prism of one man’s lifetime.

Lessons ian mcewan reviews