First Love, Last Rites

First Love, Last Rites

First edition cover
Author	Ian McEwan
Cover artist	Bill Botten
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Publisher	Jonathan Cape
Publication date	1975
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	165
ISBN

First Love, Last Rites is a collection of short stories by Ian McEwan. It was first published in 1975 by Jonathan Cape and re-issued in 1997 by Vintage.

The collection is McEwan's first published work and was regarded by the author (along with his second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets) as an opportunity to experiment and find his voice as a writer. In an interview with Christopher Ricks in 1979, McEwan commented, "They were a kind of laboratory for me. They allowed me to try out different things, to discover myself as a writer." As a piece of work that portrays McEwan, the writer, at his youngest, it is perhaps fitting that the dominant theme is that of adolescence, of the blurry and perilous divide between childhood and adulthood; in addition themes of sex, perversion, and the grotesque in its many forms feature throughout.

The book is composed of eight short stories, with the title story coming seventh:

It has been suggested by any critics that as well as adolescence, the stories revolve around the difficulty of becoming a 'man,' whatever society deems a man to be. McEwan has described adolescents as "the perfect strangers," and through his use of first person narratives in this collection focuses on that difficult and often shocking transitional period.

First Love, Last Rites received the Somerset Maugham Award for 1976; coincidentally, McEwan's friend Martin Amis had been the previous author to receive the honour.

McEwan's collection was well received by critics. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, John Fletcher explained, "Such writing would be merely sensational if it were not, like Kafka's, pointed, so accurate, so incapable indeed of being appalled. In contemporary writing one has to turn to French literature to encounter a similar contrast between the elegance of the language and the disturbing quality of the material; in writing in English McEwan is wholly unique." Critic Robert Towers described McEwan's England in The New York Review of Books as a "flat, rubble-strewn wasteland, populated by freaks and monsters, most of them articulate enough to tell their own stories with mesmerizing narrative power and an unfaltering instinct for the perfect, sickening detail"; Towers called the collection "possibly the most brilliantly perverse and sinister batch of short stories to come out of England since Angus Wilson's The Wrong Set."