Begins on a windy summer's day in the Chilterns when the calm, organised life of Joe Rose is shattered by a ballooning accident. What happens is shocking and tragic, but strangely inco-sequential. The consequences come after, for that fatal accident brings Joe together briefly, with Jed Parry. Unknown to Rose, something passes between them.

Perowne makes his way to his weekly squash game through London streets filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors. A minor car accident brings him into a confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive, young man, on the edge of violence. To Perowne's professional eye, there appears to be something profoundly wrong with him.

In a hotel 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. This book presents the story that tells how the course of life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

One windy spring day in the Chilterns Joe Rose's calm, organized life is shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon, Rose reflects, could have ended in mere tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry.

A story that begins with three young people in the garden of a country house on the hottest day of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives. A depiction of love and war, class, childhood and England, that explores shame and forgiveness, atonement and the possibility of absolution.

In the relentless summer heat, four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy, isolated world, and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves.

A true story of the Berlin Tunnel or Operation Gold, the abortive brainchild of the CIA and MI6.

Two old friends, Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence. In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact that will have consequences neither has foreseen.

Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children's books, takes his three-year-old daughter on a routine Saturday morning trip to the supermarket. While waiting in line, his attention is distracted and his daughter is kidnapped. From there, Lewis spirals into bereavement that has effects on his relationship with his wife, his psyche and time itself.

Thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever.

Presents a short story, a memerically slow-motion encounter with two terrifying dogs by an English couple who are honeymooning just after the war in a French mountain village.

As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though there waits someone who cares deeply about how they appear. Then, they meet a man with a disturbing story to tell and become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession.

When Rose sees a little boy trying to escape from the back of a truck, only to be captured and shoved back in, she decides to follow the truck. At a desolate place out of town she discovers many other children, staring hungrily from behind an electric barbed wire fence.

Containing seven interlinked stories, this work reveals the secret journeys of the grown-up Peter's metamorphoses and adventures in his childhood. It shows Peter's experiences as magical transformations when he swaps bodies with the cat, the baby Kenneth and, wakes up as a twelve-year-old inside a grown-up body and experiences falling in love.

A collection of macabre short stories. Ian McEwan received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for a previous collection of short stories entitled First Love, Last Rites .

A set of stories that show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness.

This publication is not for sale to libraries. 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.

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On a chilly February day two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence, Clive as Britain's most successful modern composer, Vernon as editor of the quality broadsheet, The Judge.