Colm Tóibín writes:

Ian McEwan has always been interested in dissecting the body, making it seem a strange set of foreign objects, and he has some great new territory here. It is not hard to imagine the surprise of Florence, the girlfriend of Edward Mayhew, a nice girl in her early twenties from a nice background in McEwan's new novel, On Chesil Beach, when 'one Saturday afternoon in late March, with the rain falling heavily outside the windows . . . she let her hand rest briefly on, or near, his penis.' What she experienced was 'a living thing, quite separate from her Edward – and she recoiled.' Edward, also in his early twenties, was so excited that 'he could bear it no more' and asked her to marry him. This short novel takes place on the first night of their honeymoon, with many flashbacks, and at the end a great flash forward, and at the core an enormous misunderstanding.

(LRB 26 April 2007)

Available in a paperback edition

Cape | hardback 166 pp. |ISBN: 9780224081184