His work has embraced everything from incest and murder to terrorism and climate change. In Machines Like Me, his latest book, McEwan’s particular interest in science conjures an alt-history world in which Britain lost the Falklands War, Turing was pardoned, and the subsequent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have produced ‘manufactured humans’.

 

‘England’s national author’ The New Yorker 

 

In conversation with Eric Wagner, author, critic and New Statesman contributing writer