Notes From Your BooksellerAn emotional novel balancing the sprawling impact of post-Nazi Europe against the internal struggles of one couple and family, the tension spreads outward as the consequences of past actions come back to rattle a married couple and their son-in-law. This was a somewhat polarizing novel for critics but those that love it have considered it one of McEwan’s best.
Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this novel is the intimate story of the crumbling of a marriage, as witnessed by an outsider—from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement.
Jeremy is the son-in-law of Bernard and June Tremaine, whose union and estrangement began almost simultaneously. Seeking to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences Bernard and June cannot reconcile, Jeremy undertakes writing June's memoirs, only to be led back again and again to one terrifying encouner forty years earlier—a moment that, for June, was as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy's own time.
In a finely crafted, compelling examination of evil and grace, Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civiliation's darkest moods—its black dogs—with the tensions that both create love and destroy it.
Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.
