Word: mcewan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...part of humanity that reads--that's still a goodly chunk, by the way--McEwan's new book is a major event. His last one, the bleakly magnificent Atonement, put him in the front rank of English-language novelists and became an international best seller--in the U.S. alone, there are 750,000 copies in print. The story of a young girl with a powerful imagination and of the terrible consequences that occur when it's misused, it was a nuanced psychological study, a powerful war drama and, finally, by way of a brisk twist at the end, a devastating...
Could Saturday hope to be its equal? McEwan doesn't try to imitate his past success. What his new book does is proceed serenely into very different territory, where the most secure existence is ringed by sinister possibilities--an enduring theme with McEwan and, these days, a good metaphor for the world post...
...have filled the streets of London to protest the impending war in Iraq. Henry Perowne, the central character, is a prosperous and contented neurosurgeon. But his happiness is infringed by a persistent, low-intensity fear of a terrorist attack. The pros and cons of the Iraq invasion are among McEwan's concerns here; the son of a career officer in the British army, he says he was more opposed to the war than Perowne. "But I gave him my ambivalence about...
...McEwan also has much wider matters in mind, like happiness, family and work in a world in which life is a brief interval before the extinction of death. "I don't believe in God," McEwan explains softly. "But the world is just as warm, as rich, if not warmer and richer, when seen without a religious point of view." And just as menacing. While driving to his regular squash game, thinking of the dinner he will cook that night to celebrate the return of his grown daughter from France, Perowne has a small collision. The other car is driven...
...think of Perowne when you approach the London town house that McEwan shares with Annalena McAfee, his second wife, an arts editor at the Guardian newspaper. Located on a neo-classical square laid out by Robert Adam, it also faces onto the British Telecom Tower, a '60s-era spike. Perowne lives in a house with the same views. And the poignant ramblings of his mother Lily, who suffers from vascular dementia--"I put sap in the clock to make it moist"--are transcribed directly from the speech of McEwan's mother Rose, using notes McEwan took on visits before...