Saturday: A Novel

Overview

From the pen of a master - the #1 bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Atonement - comes an astonishing novel that captures the fine balance of happiness and the unforeseen threats that can destroy it. A brilliant, thrilling page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children. Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day off. He is as at ease here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before. On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne's day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Editorial Reviews

In the predawn sky on a Saturday morning, London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne sees a plane with a wing afire streaking toward Heathrow. His first thought is terrorism-especially since this is the day of a public demonstration against the pending Iraq war. Eventually, danger to Perowne and his family will come from another source, but the plane, like the balloon in the first scene of Enduring Love, turns out to be a harbinger of a world forever changed. Meanwhile, the reader follows Perowne through his day, mainly via an interior monologue. His cerebral peregrination records, in turn, the meticulous details of brain surgery, a car accident followed by a confrontation with a hoodlum, a far-from-routine squash game, a visit to Perowne's mother in a nursing home and a family reunion. It is during the latter event, at the end of the day, that the ominous pall that has hovered over the narrative explodes into violence, and Perowne's sense that the world has become "a commuity of anxiety" plays out in suspense, delusion, heroism and reconciliation. The tension throughout the novel between science (Perowne's surgery) and art (his daughter is a poet; his son a musician) culminates in a synthesis of the two, and a grave, hopeful, meaningful, transcendent ending. If this novel is not as complex a work as McEwan's bestselling Atonement, it is nonetheless a wise and poignant portrait of the way we live now. (Mar. 22) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Ian McEwan

Born in 1948, the son of a Scots sergeant-major, Ian McEwan's childhood was a typical army one of the time - moving from Aldershot to Singapore and then again to Tripoli so at the age of eleven he was sent away to Woolverstone Hall, a state-run boarding school. He describes himself as 'a very mediocre pupil' until he was seventeen, when he began to find English literature exciting. After graduating from Sussex University he went on to do an MA course in creative writing at East Anglia, under the direction of Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, and began writing short stories. His first short story, Homemade, was accepted by The New American Review and the money earned from its publication paid the way for a trip to Afghanistan. In 1972 he returned to England and taught English as a second language whilst writing. In 1975 his volume of short stories First Love, Last Rites was published to sensational critical acclaim. Al Alvarez hailed it as a 'brilliant debut by the most promising writer around' and Anthony Thwaite described the book as 'a brilliant performance... with an originality astonishing for a writer still in his twenties.' It won the Somerset Maugham Award and revitalised the short story form. In 1978, his second collection of stories In Between the Sheets, with the now familiar McEwan themes of adolescent sexual awakenings, the perverse and the macabre, shocked the English literary establishment. 'What is strange and subterranean about human nature interest me far more than writing fiction about people accumulating wealth or losing wealth.' In 1978, The Cement Garden, his first novel, was published to great acclaim - 'a near perfect novelist' (The Spectator). In 1979, his television play Solid Geometry made the headlines when the BBC banned it, ostensibly for a scene displaying a pickled penis in a jar...and Ian McEwan was established as 'a leading literary spokesman for his generation'. In 1980, the BBC production of The Imitation Game gained instant recognition - 'A Play for Today of rare distinction' (Clive James). In 1981, his second novel The Comfort of Strangers was published and again, hailed as the work of one of the most outstanding writers of the 20th century. 'McEwan has already created a style and a vision of his own...no-one can afford not to read him.' (John Fowles). The Comfort of Strangers was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize. The Child in Time, his third novel, published in 1987, won the Whitbread Award for the best novel of that year. Phenomenally well received, it drew high praise from Craig Raine and Jeanette Winterson and John Carey said in the Sunday Times: 'If you want to be appalled, refreshed, exhilarated, enlivened - read it.' The Innocent, published in 1990, was an extraordinary achievement. He took a genre until then dominated by Deighton and le Carre - and completely reinvented it. 'It displays the immaculate artistry we have come to expect from one of Britain's most highly respected novelists,' Sunday Times. Black Dogs was published in 1993 and once again the plaudits followed; '...testament to one of recent fiction's most remarkable regeneration: McEwan's transformation from a purveyor of knowingly nasty tales to a novelist unsurpassed for his responsive, responsible humanity.' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times Enduring Love was published in September 1997 to huge critical and commercial success; 'Enduring Love is an excellent book, executed with all McEwan's customary panache, all his usual readability and screw-tightening.' Mail on Sunday. The film adaptation is released in November 2004. Atonement was published in 2002 and went on to be a huge bestseller.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Anchor

Filesize

608.58 KB

Number of Pages

304

eBook ISBN

9780307277015

Awards

• American Library Association Notable Books
• Book Sense Book of the Year
• Man Booker Prize for Fiction
• New York Times Notable Books of the Year