First Love, Last Rites was published by Jonathan Cape in 1975 and announced the arrival of one of the most formally accomplished English prose stylists since Evelyn Waugh — though the content was more likely to recall Poe or the Marquis de Sade. Ian McEwan was twenty-seven, recently graduated from Malcolm Bradbury’s creative writing program at the University of East Anglia, and the stories he produced were so precisely disturbing that reviewers immediately dubbed him “Ian Macabre.”
The Stories
“Homemade” — the collection’s most notorious story: a teenage boy’s first sexual experience, with his ten-year-old sister. McEwan tells it in first person, from the boy’s perspective, with a matter-of-factness that is more disturbing than any amount of moralizing would be.
“Last Day of Summer” — a boy befriends a mentally disabled girl; the story’s ending suggests violence that is never explicitly described. McEwan’s method of implication — showing aftermath without showing act — is already fully developed.
“Butterflies” — the most shocking story: an apparent child murder told from the perpetrator’s perspective with chilling detachment. The prose is beautiful; the content is appalling. The disjunction is the point.
“Cocker at the Theatre” — pornographic theatre observed with anthropological distance.
“Solid Geometry” — a man obsessed with a preserved penis in a jar discovers a geometric formula for making objects disappear. He uses it on his girlfriend.
Method
McEwan’s early method is characterized by:
- Precision — every sentence is exact; nothing is wasted
- Transgression — the stories systematically violate taboos (incest, pedophilia, violence) without sensationalism
- Detachment — the narrating voices are calm, observational, clinical — which makes the content more disturbing, not less
- Formal control — the stories are architecturally perfect, built like watches
The combination of beautiful prose and horrible content creates a distinctive reading experience: pleasure and revulsion coexisting in the same sentence.
Reception and Legacy
The collection won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 and established McEwan’s reputation. He would eventually move toward more conventional (though still brilliant) literary fiction — Atonement, Saturday, On Chesil Beach — but these early stories remain his most formally perfect and most disturbing work.
Collecting First Love, Last Rites
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1975): Rust-colored cloth binding. Dust jacket with illustration.
Identification points:
- Jonathan Cape imprint
- “First published 1975” stated
- 160 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $800–$2,000. McEwan’s first book, published in a modest first printing by a prestigious literary house.
Signed copies: $1,500–$4,000.
First American edition (Random House, New York, 1975): Published the same year. $200–$500 in jacket.
As McEwan’s debut and the Somerset Maugham winner, it commands the premium that always attaches to a major writer’s first book. McEwan’s subsequent success (Atonement alone sold millions) has driven all his first editions upward.