Sweet Tooth / Ian McEwan, 304 pp.

I saw Atonement along with the rest of the world and always meant to read McEwan but never got around to it.  I thought the Atonement narrative was a little purple and throbbing, but was pleasantly surprised here.  Serena Frome is a beautiful young Cambridge grad at loose ends in 1972, when she's steered towards a job at MI5 and given an assignment to surreptitiously recruit an up-and-coming novelist whose work will champion the anti-Soviet cause.  She falls in love with her target, though, and things get complicated.  One of the best surprise twists of an ending I've read in a while, this is ultimately about narrative: how does it work, who gets to tell it, and what does it mean?