Its protagonist, Michael Beard, is McEwan’s third to have a science background—he’s a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

On Chesil Beach’: Did You Catch Florence’s Backstory? ‘On Chesil Beach’: Did You Catch Florence’s Backstory?

It is a memorable exposé of how terrible wounds can be inflicted and the entire course of a life changed -- by doing nothing.McEwan exposes the rationalisations and self-deceptions we all succumb to in situations of great emotional uncertainty, the shifts in perception that show what changeable and unpredictable beings we can be to ourselves, let alone one another. Anya Jaremko-Greenwold of Flood Magazine wrote that "while men might fail to recognize how intimidating the expectation of sex can be for women, it’s something McEwan’s novel (and the film, for which he wrote the screenplay) hinges upon with exquisite delicacy. He paused, but he couldn’t help himself, and paraphrased a line from “Saturday”: “It’s now the dominant scientific position, you know, that parents have almost no influence.

On Chesil Beach Summary | SuperSummary On Chesil Beach Summary | SuperSummary

In doing so, the book takes us deeper into two people's lives, counter-pointing the tensions of the present with the great backwash of their past and the surging of a future neither can fully see.Though McEwan says that he’s happy to have found a brother—he likens it to “a Shakespeare comedy”—the discovery entailed a pained “recalibration” of his family history. She remembered the rustle of the clothes, the clink of a belt unfastened or of keys and or loose change. We saw only tracks, but it was a thrill to think that there was something out there that wanted to eat me. McEwan says, “The critic was revealing far more about himself and his wife’s teeth-flossing habits than anything about the book. In the late seventies, he read “The Dancing Wu Li Masters,” a book, by Gary Zukav, that draws tendentious connections between quantum mechanics and Eastern mysticism.