IAN MCEWAN is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

"Heartbreaking.... Breathtaking.... Masterly.... No one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." --The Washington Post Book World

"Remarkable, engaging, and gripping.... On Chesil Beach is not only a wonderful read but also perhaps that rarest of things: a perfect novel." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Dazzling.... McEwan treats [his subject] with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any [he's] written." --Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review

"A small, perfect, haunting work of art.... McEwan draws a humane, touching, sometimes comic portrait of marital misunderstanding in an era when so much less was sayable, or said." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Vintage McEwan.... His finely honed prose is a deep pleasure to experience." --Chicago Sun-Times

"Marvelously realized.... Wrenching, funny, smart, and hugely gratifying in unexpected ways.... On Chesil Beach is as merciful to its characters as it is merciless in its heartbreak." --The Boston Globe

"Exquisite.... compressed, crisp, [and] warmly specific.... [A] small masterpiece." --Entertainment Weekly, "A"

"Quietly riveting.... McEwan has never written more beautifully than he does in [this] melancholy and haunting new novel." --O, The Oprah Magazine

"A poignant meditation on love's ebb and flow." --Vogue

"A parable of failed empathy ... mordant [and] melancholy." --The Village Voice

"Completely absorbing.... [I]nfused with a bitter poignancy...intense and powerful ... a masterpiece." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Pub date: 2008-06-10

Length: 224 pages