Florence, the daughter of a successful businessman and an aloof Oxford academic, is a talented musician. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from McEwan a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken. Ian McEwan has caught with understanding and compassion the innocence of Edward and Florence at a time when marriage was presumed to be the outward sign of maturity and independence. Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence's response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence's anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Highly recommended.A novel of remarkable depth and poignancy from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. In beautiful prose, stunningly elegant writing, and rich observations of life in the early 1960s with all that the decade of 'enlightenment' and changes in England and the world produced, Ian McEwan has created another masterpiece. McEwan leads into this evening and its subsequent resolution on Chesil Beach with delicate prose, brings us to the topic of climax, and then offers flashes of background of each of his characters that allows us to understand the subsequent course of events 'doing nothing' brings. Edward, her new husband, is of lower class than she, but has reached a degree of education and overcome some thorny family obstacles to become a young bridegroom longing for his marriage night, a night he blunders with premature ejaculation. Florence is bright, a gifted violinist, beautiful and fragile in affairs of the heart and senses: she is frigid. ON CHESIL BEACH is essentially a study of a wedding night, a night when the two characters involved approach the virginal consummation of their marriage with disastrous results. Few writers of today can match his quiet, subtle, but bravura technique. Reading McEwan is one of the rare pleasures literature lovers find.

He selects strange topics and then makes them feel so familiar by comparison to each of our lives that exploring the dense background he paints pulls us in like a strong magnet. Ian McEwan is a master of atmospheric writing, taking a seemingly isolated incident and building a story around it in a way that the reader completely lives in the moment described by his novel.

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