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. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in de-familiarisation. Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and-worst of all-becoming strangers to those who love them. If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.') Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.Īpart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals-the contingencies-that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. (One insane epistle begins, 'I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that same night. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. In itself, the accident would change the couple and the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach.

The perfect day turns to nightmare however, when they are involved in freak ballooning accident in which a boy is saved but a man is killed. Joe planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after 6 weeks in the States.

Enduring love ian