On Chesil Beach

From the back of the book: 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...

On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from Ian McEwan - a story about how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

On Chesil Beach is a novella by the Booker Prize-winning author, Ian McEwan. As the blurb says, it centres around one key evening in the lives of a just-married couple on the first night of their honeymoon. It’s a simple idea but McEwan always manages to craft believable depth in his plots and characters that you never feel you’ve read a two-dimensional short story.

It isn’t a happy story but it’s an honest one. I don’t know about any of you but when I read about a character who is feeling something upsetting, whether it’s fear, hate, embarrassment, disgust, lonely… whatever it may be… there’s always the possibility for some form of happiness or relief if that is a feeling that I can personally relates to. That was really badly explained… but to make it clearer. In this novella’s case, embarrassment, fear and a sense of these feelings being both unspoken and unspeakable are all things that I can relate to. Maybe not in this specific situation, sure, but whether it’s at work or at home, all those feelings come into play at some point and so when you read a character suffering the same emotions, there is a sense of relief that ‘you’re not the only one’. McEwan writes so honestly that you can’t help but find that appealing, whatever the plot’s outcome might be.

In such a short book, McEwan doesn’t sacrifice depth or power – you well and truly get sucked in. I personally read this over 2 days but yet it still had a profound effect on me. It’s not a new release, so you probably have already read it, but if you haven’t then I’d recommend it, especially if you’re someone who dreads starting a 900 page brick of a novel… like me… except Potter, of course – got to forgive Rowling for that…

The Financial Times: 'Superb... The protagonists have everything to lose, and their faltering journey towards a point of no return is conjured into life by McEwan with irresistible subtlety, tact and force' 

7/10