The Children Act Reading Order

The Children Act (2014) by Ian McEwan follows Fiona Maye — a distinguished High Court judge in the Family Division — in two parallel stories that begin on the same night: her husband of thirty years tells her he wants to have an affair, and she is presented with a case involving a seventeen-year-old Jehovah's Witness named Adam Henry who is refusing a blood transfusion that would save his life. Fiona makes an unusual decision — she visits Adam in hospital before ruling — and the ruling she makes and the relationship it triggers prove to have consequences she could not have anticipated. The novel is McEwan at his most schematic but also, in the Adam sections, at his most moving.