Reasonableness, tears, desperation, vague threat – and now honest supplication.”Īnother theme is: how do you talk about a life-changing event like that and with whom? He constantly relives the event and experiences guilt or some “unnamed sensation” of “did I do the wrong thing?” The plot thickens when he visits the dead man’s wife who puts a whole new spin on the incident even though she wasn’t there. “What was so exhausting about him was the variety of his emotional states and the speed of their transitions.

It doesn’t go well and impacts what had been a good marriage. The main story becomes how the journalist reacts to his stalker and how he shares his fear with his wife. He’s also a religious nut whose goal is “to bring you to God, through love.”

Our journalist’s lover turns into a violent stalker. A group of men in a park try to grab the balloon in a moment of “democratic chaos” of attempted rescue without a leader, with each doing different things and yelling different commands – “hold on, let go.” I’m not giving away any plot – we know all this from the blurbs and by the end of the first chapter. The onset of love is provoked by a tragedy – a ballooning accident in which a father is killed, dropping from clinging to the balloon, while his son is saved inside the balloon. The sudden and obsessive love is directed at our main character, a married male journalist who writes science articles for magazines. A ballooning accident leads to a man acquiring a male stalker who interferes so much in his life that it begins to endanger the first man’s marriage. Well we have to give McEwan an A+ for an original plot on this one. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year.

His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan