Nutshell (3*)

Not the author's best, that's for sure.  The musings of an in utero oenophile with a taste for Sancerre who nervously narrates the murder of one parent by another and contemplates its impact.  His perspective elicits a few puerile chuckles.

Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose.

The man who obliterates my mother between the sheets obeys like a dog.  Sex, I begin to understand, is its own mountain kingdom, secret and intact.  In the valley below we know only rumors.

This slight novel may appeal more to readers with a fondness for the crime genre, although McEwan has more on his mind than that.  I particularly enjoyed his mordant take on world outside of the amniotic sac:

The lecturer took a dim view of our species, of which psychopaths are a constant fraction, a human constant.  Armed struggle, just or not, attracts them.  They help to tip local struggles into bigger conflicts.  Europe, according to her, in existential crisis, fractious and weak as varieties of self-loving nationalism sip that same tasty brew.  Confusion about values, the bacillus of anti-Semitism incubating, immigrant populations languishing, angry and bored.  Elsewhere, everywhere, novel inequalities of wealth, the super rich a race apart.  Ingenuity deployed by states for new forms of brilliant weaponry, by global corporations to dodge taxes, by righteous banks to stuff themselves with Christmas millions.  China, too big to need friends or counsel, cynically probing its neighbours' shores, building islands of tropical sand, planning for the war it knows must come.  Muslim-majority countries plagued by religious puritanism, by sexual sickness, by smothered invention.  The Middle East, fast-breeder for a possible world war.  And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran.  Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun.  Africa yet to learn democracy's party trick--the peaceful transfer of power.  Its children dying, thousands by the week, for want of easy things--clean water, mosquito nets, cheap nets, cheap drugs.  Uniting and leveling all humanity, the dull old facts of altered climate, vanishing forests, creatures and polar ice.  Profitable and poisonous agriculture obliterating biological beauty.  Oceans turning to weak acid.  Well above the horizon, approaching fast, the ruinous tsunami of the burgeoning old, cancerous and demented, demanding care.  And soon with demographic transition, the reverse, populations in catastrophic decline.  Free speech no longer free, liberal democracy no longer the obvious port of destiny, robots stealing jobs, liberty in close combat with security, socialism in disgrace, capitalism corrupt, destructive and in disgrace, no alternatives in sight.

And still the fetus demands to be born!