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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.
What reviewers said:
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
A master feat of concentration in both senses of the word...
Peter Kemp Sunday Times
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
It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly...
Karl Miller TLS
It is a measure of McEwan's artistry that he is able here both to linger in the recording of sensuous particularities and at the same time to deliver the satisfactions of plot we are accustomed to deriving from his fiction...
Time Out, Book of the Week
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
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
McEwan shares with his fellow English novelist Jim Crace not only an interest in history but in finding a style in prose that is slow-moving, yet compelling, at times stilted and dry, and then suddenly sharp and precise...
Colm Toibin London Review of Books
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
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
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