On Chesil Beach

by Ian McEwan
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A short novel of quite remarkable depth, power and poignancy by a writer at the height of his powers

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Synopsis

It is June 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come…On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from Ian McEwan – a story about how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

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Editorial Reviews

"McEwan's brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate discrete moments in life and invest them with incredible significance" - Tim Adams, Observer

"McEwan's style is lean and clear...every sentence feels carefully crafted, the words all perfectly in place" - John Harding, Daily Mail

"A tightly focused human drama... McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous... The bedroom scene itself is carried off brilliantly" - Christopher Taylor, Sunday Telegraph

"A fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowered to devastating effect" - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday

"McEwan is the kind of author who can say more in a sentence than most can say in a chapter...This is a thoughtful book which provokes thought. But more immediately than that, this is a book which, while managing to be very funny, gives us a wonderful and moving portrait of a specific time, and two of its hostages, and of how to make a mess of love" - Keith Ridgeway, Irish Times

"This is McEwan's mature style, one we have come to recognise from Atonement and Saturday. It is a polished, civilised style, and very distant from the shock tactics of his early work... McEwan brings Florence and Edward touchingly alive for us; and their seriousness, their idealism, and their desire for love draw us towards them" - Natasha Walter, Guardian

"A master feat of concentration in both senses of the word" - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

"One of our greatest living writers. Many Easter weekends and train journeys will be enlivened by a compelling novella" - Christopher Dolan, Herald

"To commend an author for being reminiscent of Edith Wharton is a compliment that this reviewer reserves for a select few. Yet with On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan has earnt it" - Lionel Shriver, Telegraph

"It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly" - Karl Miller, TLS

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