Black Dogs - by Ian McEwan (Paperback)

About the Book

One of today's most celebrated novelists returns with a novel about family and political loyalties at the end of the Cold War. Writing a memoir of his parents-in-law, Jeremy relates the strange events that brought June and Bernard Tremaine together and set them apart. McEwan is the author of The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers.

Book Synopsis

Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this novel is the intimate story of the crumbling of a marriage, as witnessed by an outsider--from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement.

"Brilliant.... [A] meditation on ... the intoxications and the redemptive power of love." --The New Yorker

Jeremy is the son-in-law of Bernard and June Tremaine, whose union and estrangement began almost simultaneously. Seeking to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences Bernard and June cannot reconcile, Jeremy undertakes writing June's memoirs, only to be led back again and again to one terrifying encouner forty years earlier--a moment that, for June, was as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy's own time.

In a finely crafted, compelling examination of evil and grace, Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civiliation's darkest moods--its black dogs--with the tensions that both create love and destroy it.

Review Quotes

"Brilliant.... [A] meditation on ... the intoxications and the redemptive power of love." --The New Yorker

"Subtle and unforgettable." --Voice Literary Supplement

"The novel's vision of Europe is acute and alive, vivid in its moral complexities ... we are conquered by the humanity, the urgency, of the novel's characters." --The New York Times Book Review

"Each scene is brilliantly lit, and has a characteristically strange fascination as Ian McEwan juxtaposes 'huge and tiny currents' to show the ways in which individuals react to history." --The New York Review of Books

About the Author

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.