Saturday
New York: Nan A. Talese [An imprint of Doubleday], 2005. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [10[, 289, [5] pages. Author signed on Doubleday bookplate on fep. Illustrated title page. Ian Russell McEwan, CBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 21 June 1948) is an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". McEwan began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. His first two novels, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. His novel Enduring Love was adapted into a film of the same name. He won the Booker Prize with Amsterdam (1998). His next novel, Atonement, garnered acclaim and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film featuring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. His later novels have included Saturday, The Children Act, Nutshell, and Machines Like Me. He was awarded the 1999 Shakespeare Prize, and the 2011 Jerusalem Prize. Saturday (2005), follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. Saturday won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2005. 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. After an unusual sighting in the early morning sky, he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug. To Perowne's professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man, who in turn believes the surgeon has humiliated him, with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep his family alive. Saturday is McEwan's ninth novel, published between Atonement and On Chesil Beach, two works of historical fiction. McEwan has discussed that he prefers to alternate between writing about the past and the present. While researching the book, McEwan spent two years work-shadowing Neil Kitchen, a neurosurgeon at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, London. He also had several medical doctors and surgeons review the book for accuracy, though few corrections were required to the surgical description. Saturday was also proofread by McEwan's long-standing circle of friends who review his manuscripts, Timothy Garton Ash, Craig Raine, and Galen Strawson. There are elements of autobiography in Saturday: the protagonist lives in Fitzroy Square, the same square in London that McEwan does and is physically active in middle age. Christopher Hitchens, a friend of McEwan's, noted how Perowne's wife, parents and children are the same as the writer's. Excerpts were published in five different literary magazines, including the whole of chapter one in the New York Times Book Review, in late 2004 and early 2005. The complete novel was published by the Jonathan Cape Imprint of Random House Books in February 2005 in London, New York, and Toronto; Dutch, Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and Japanese translations followed. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Henry Perowne, Neurosurgeon, Newspaper, Lawyer, Marriage, Squash, Anesthetist, Marchers, Protesters, Huntington’s, Thug, John Grammaticus, Emergency Surgery, Threat, Knifepoint, Poet, Daisy
ISBN: 0385511809
[Book #83953]
Price: $250.00