In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowering to devastating effect. In 2006, Ian McEwan 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.

On Chesil Beach - Wikipedia

This is a small novel, 160 pages, but a very concentrated one; a miniature aware of the world beyond it. He composed words “without a pen in my hand, framing a sentence in my mind, often losing the beginning as I reached the end, and only when the thing was secure and complete would I set it down. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The question is whether his personality is going to get in the way—which, in a sense, is our shared problem.Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence.

On Chesil Beach Summary | GradeSaver On Chesil Beach Summary | GradeSaver

McEwan’s journeys have grown even more exotic since the international success of “Atonement,” which has sold more than four million copies since it was published. The Spanish site, he said, was a “beauty”: “It’s an enormous tower with huge mirrors focussed on its top. Solar won The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2010 and Sweet Tooth won the Paddy Power Political Fiction Book of the Year award in 2012.

The powers of sweet reason look a lot more attractive post-9/11 than the beckonings of faith, and I no longer put them on equal scales. On another occasion, McEwan, speaking of 9/11, told me, “Faith is at best morally neutral, and at worst a vile mental distortion. She tries to mentally prepare herself for the inevitable consummation, but the thought continues to repel her. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan - Books - The New York Times On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan - Books - The New York Times

McEwan knew that global warming was precisely the kind of grand, public-spirited subject that a national author is expected to take on. Although his novels headily explore ideas, and his gift for visual detail approaches that of John Updike (Briony’s cousin, fondling a suitcase: “The polished metal was cool, and her touch left little patches of shrinking condensation”), his international success has a lot to do with an old-fashioned talent for creating suspense.

The novel has felicities which ensure, rather than embellish, the humanity of its treatment of the lovers' predicament. In October 2016, it was announced that Thorsten Schumacher's new film and TV outfit Rocket Science had come on board to complete international sales. Meanwhile, we’d be sitting inside our little ark, with the whole of the planet’s population below us, talking about how we were going to save the world. In the published version of “On Chesil Beach,” there is a hint that Florence’s wedding-night fear might be tied to memories of a predatory father. After June Tremaine escapes an attack by dogs—“spirit hounds, incarnations”—she is left “convinced of the existence of evil and of God.