The Comfort of Strangers

by Ian McEwan

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

When a buttoned-up British couple take a vacation, they meet a mysterious man and his wife that set them hurtling down a path from an unsettling obsession toward a violent conclusion. Dealing with themes of love, power and control, The Comfort of Strangers will leave readers utterly enthralled and unable to look away, even when it’s too late.

A vacationing English couple find more than they bargained for, in this inventive and unsettling novel from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement.

Visiting an unnamed city, Mary and Colin attract the interest of Robert, a charismatic older man with a story to tell. But the more they get to know Robert—and his disabled wife, Caroline—the more apparent it becomes that there’s something not quite right about their new friends. A shocking work of violence and obsession, The Comfort of Strangers is Ian McEwan at his very best.

Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679749844
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/01/1994
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	376,308
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.35(d)

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.

Hometown:

Oxford, England

Date of Birth:

June 21, 1948

Place of Birth:

Aldershot, England

Education:

B.A., University of Sussex, 1970; M.A., University of East Anglia, 1971

Website:

http://www.ianmcewan.com

Editorial Reviews

"As the best young writer on this island, McEwan's evocations of feeling and place and his analysis of mood and relationship remain haunting and compelling." —The Times (London)

"As always, McEwan manages his own idiom with remarkable grace and inventiveness; his characters are at home in their dreams, and so is he." —The Guardian

"The Maestro." —New Statesman

"McEwan has—a style and a vision of life of his own...No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary Britain can afford not to read him." —John Fowles

"A sparkling and adventurous writer." —Dennis Potter

“McEwan, that master of the taciturn macabre, so organizes his narrative that, without insisting anything, every turn and glimpse is another tightening of the noose. The evils of power and the power of evil are transmitted with a steely coolness, and in a prose that has a feline grace.” —Observer

From the Publisher