As Serena navigates her bosses’ suspicions, her colleagues’ resentments, and her lover’s literary ambitions, how long can she maintain her cover story and keep all of them deceived? And is she the only one with a secret agenda? In this superbly witty story of betrayal and intrigue, McEwan dizzyingly dramatizes the fraught relationship between fiction and truth. But before long she falls in love with her unwitting target, Tom Haley, an aspiring novelist. There she lands an assignment in Operation Sweet Tooth: the secret support of anti-Communist writers.

Serena Frome - beautiful, politically naïve, and a compulsive reader of novels - has just completed her maths degree at Cambridge and taken an intelligence job with MI5. It is 1972 unrest and terrorism are increasing in Britain, and the Cold War has devolved into cultural skirmishing. Ian McEwan’s novel of love and espionage is a wickedly funny and devilishly clever tale in which nothing is quite as it seems. Ian McEwan is the greatest living writer. The man is at the absolute top of his game. After reading my eighth Ian McEwan novel, I'm convinced that he just gets better and better. His setting, his characters, and his tale feel as if they are your own, so perfectly do they dovetail with your world.

He doesn't tell the story so much as let you live inside it. His ability to crawl into a character and expose every flaw, rationalization, and weakness, yet at the same time expose her vulnerability and insecurity, is just flat-out astonishing. It seems clear where the novel will go, but I guess I was fooled once again by the amazing mind of Ian McEwan. Yes, she falls for Tom, and yes, she keeps her identity and the source of his new funding from him. (Having MI5 pay a writer to influence others seems too close to buying public opinion.) Serena's job is to give this welcoming news to a struggling writer, Tom Healey, who is trapped by the drudgery of a full-time job as a university professor. 'Sweet Tooth' is the code name for a loosely reasoned plan to financially back struggling artists by giving them a stipend and letting them produce art, with the proviso that the funding is coming from another source.

And soon, she does get an undercover assignment. Still suffering the effects of a demoralizing breakup, she takes the job anyway. After suffering through a couple of bad love affairs, Serena, a beautiful 20-something university graduate, stumbles into a job with MI5 and is thrilled.until she realizes women only hold clerical positions. Ian McEwan's Cold War-era spy tale is not what it appears to be.

Sweet tooth novel review