Vintage International
3 total works
In the arid summer heat, four children – Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom – find themselves abruptly orphaned. All the routines of childhood are cast aside as the children adapt to a now parentless world. Alone in the house together, the children’s lives twist into something unrecognisable as the outside begins to bear down on them.
A vacationing English couple find more than they bargained for, in this unsettling novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Atonement.
Visiting an unnamed city, Mary and Colin attract the interest of Robert, a charismatic older man with a story to tell. But the more they get to know Robert—and his disabled wife, Caroline—the more apparent it becomes that there’s something not quite right about their new friends. A shocking work of violence and obsession, The Comfort of Strangers is Ian McEwan at his very best.
Visiting an unnamed city, Mary and Colin attract the interest of Robert, a charismatic older man with a story to tell. But the more they get to know Robert—and his disabled wife, Caroline—the more apparent it becomes that there’s something not quite right about their new friends. A shocking work of violence and obsession, The Comfort of Strangers is Ian McEwan at his very best.
Call them transcripts of dreams or deadly accurate maps of the tremor zones of the psyche, the seven stories in this collection engage and implicate us in the most fearful ways imaginable. A two-timing pornographer becomes an unwilling object in the fantasies of one of his victims. A jaded millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress and plunges into a hell of jealousy and despair. And in the course of a weekend with his teenage daughter, a guilt-ridden father discovers the depths of his own blundering innocence.
At once chilling and beguiling, and written in prose of lacerating beauty, In Between the Sheets is a tour de force by one of England's most acclaimed practitioners of literary unease.
At once chilling and beguiling, and written in prose of lacerating beauty, In Between the Sheets is a tour de force by one of England's most acclaimed practitioners of literary unease.