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Ian McEwan

Saturday: A novel Hardcover – March 22, 2005

by Ian McEwan (Author)

462 customer reviews

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From the pen of a master — the #1 bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Atonement — comes an astonishing novel that captures the fine balance of happiness and the unforeseen threats that can destroy it. A brilliant, thrilling page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children. Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day off. He is as at ease here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before.

On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne’s day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary. After an unusual sighting in the early morning sky, he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug. To Perowne’s professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man, who in turn believes the surgeon has humiliated him — with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep his family alive.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the predawn sky on a Saturday morning, London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne sees a plane with a wing afire streaking toward Heathrow. His first thought is terrorism--especially since this is the day of a public demonstration against the pending Iraq war. Eventually, danger to Perowne and his family will come from another source, but the plane, like the balloon in the first scene of Enduring Love, turns out to be a harbinger of a world forever changed. Meanwhile, the reader follows Perowne through his day, mainly via an interior monologue. His cerebral peregrination records, in turn, the meticulous details of brain surgery, a car accident followed by a confrontation with a hoodlum, a far-from-routine squash game, a visit to Perowne's mother in a nursing home and a family reunion. It is during the latter event, at the end of the day, that the ominous pall that has hovered over the narrative explodes into violence, and Perowne's sense that the world has become "a commuity of anxiety" plays out in suspense, delusion, heroism and reconciliation. The tension throughout the novel between science (Perowne's surgery) and art (his daughter is a poet; his son a musician) culminates in a synthesis of the two, and a grave, hopeful, meaningful, transcendent ending. If this novel is not as complex a work as McEwan's bestselling Atonement, it is nonetheless a wise and poignant portrait of the way we live now. (Mar. 22)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

As McEwan writers, “When anything can happen, everything matters.” Saturday magnifies a pivotal moment in history and a day in a man’s life as secure foundations crack and uncertainty rushes in. While critics cited different overriding themes, Saturday explores ideas of fate and purpose, life’s fragility, revelation, and terror at all levels of society. McEwan, an enduring talent in Britain combines “literary seriousness” with a “momentum more commonly associated with genre fiction.” The result is an intricate, captivating novel defined by a “serene tension” that erupts into a dark reality despite its hero’s optimism (New York Times Book Review).

McEwan brilliantly builds many layers of reality from small details. Henry-a sympathetic, if conflicted, character-knows he can examine people’s brains, but not understand their minds. His ruminations on surgery, lovemaking, music, war (he’s pro-war), and literature (he’s clueless) rise to a crescendo as he slowly questions his own motives and actions. In dazzling, authoritative prose, McEwan depicts this growing anxiety with a calmness that is soon violated.

Despite its appeal on both sides of the Atlantic, a few reviewers thought McEwan’s intricate plotting and slow, dark suspense was too structured. The novel’s explicit messages deprive the reader of “feeling, rather than coolly registering, the author’s intention” (New York Times Book Review). Yet, in the end, most critics agree that Saturday is both a substantial work of literature by one of Britain’s greatest minds and a powerful piece of post-9/11 fiction.

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Product details

Hardcover: 289 pages
Publisher: Nan A. Talese; 1st edition (April 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385511809
ISBN-13: 978-0385511803
Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 462 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #944,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3219 in Political Fiction (Books)
- #49067 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #11291 in Family Saga Fiction

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Katy Kat

A drudging, maddeningly dull rhapsody on modern life

January 14, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Oh, God. You know how your parents always tell you not to say anything if you don't have anything nice to say? I try to adhere to that, but I want to warn people as to what they're getting into.
It should be noted that I wouldn't have chosen to read this book just for fun; instead, it was picked for a book club I participate in. Within the first page you can tell it's going to be rough.
The characters are lifeless, one dimensional portrayals of what is pawned off as modern day life. Each paragraph is exquisite torture as you're left wondering when the hell McEwan will pause to take a breath. Saying the book picks up about halfway through is accurate, but you have to consider that relatively- like an old guy with a cane moves faster than a snail.
Even the musings on Iraq and 9/11 aren't remotely interesting, as you could get an equally insightful view from any drunk man at a bar in New York City.
Any fleeting moments of poignancy are drowned in a shimmering sea of excruciating detail that reads like McEwan wants you to recognize how smart he is.
Good God. All in all, this is a hellish novel that has permanently turned me off of my desire to read Atonement. I wish I could get back the hours spent slogging through this novel.

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Billard

You need patience for this book.

June 17, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This book was so incredibly slow moving I just had to give up. The narrator had to think about and analyse every minute action that it became painful to read. Pages and pages on why and how he bought his current car, pages and pages on what was going through his head as he walked down the street. I'd read a fair bit of this book when I realised all he had done was wake up in the middle of the night, observe a scene out the widow and get ready to go out for a game of squash. Then I decided life was too short to keep reading. If you are an extremely patient and analytical person with lots of spare time you may find this to be a deep and meaningful read but it's not for me.

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DMB

You'll need a month of Saturdays to get through this book . . . .

August 13, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Great writer, he's just not for me. Saturday was the longest bad day ever.

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Brittany Gardner

Saturday - Excellent writing, a slow start to the plot.

January 28, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Saturday revolves around Henry Perowne and follows him through one day of his life. It starts out simply enough, with his wife and him going their separate ways to take care of what needs to be done. He is planning to play squash, visit his mother in her nursing home, and cook a meal for his family since his daughter and father-in-law will be coming to town that night. He begins the day watching a plane that has caught fire trail through the sky toward Heathrow, and things from there escalate in a different direction than he planned. It is a confrontation over a traffic accident that completely derails Perowne's day and threatens to destroy his family.

This book was hard to get into. The plot didn't really pick up for me until about page 87 or so, when he has the confrontation. Before that, I was dragging to get through the book. I'm also not sure if I like the main character as he seems very proud of himself and seems to think he knows everything. There weren't really any characters that I truly enjoyed reading about.

I gave the book three stars simply because the writing is so great. The author is inside Perowne's head and does a great job of outlining the weird tangents that a person can get on in their thoughts after hearing a certain word or just experiencing a certain trigger. While this is a tough book to read because the action is not really fast and the character jumps topics a lot, the writing is really great because this a hard type of novel to write. The plot has points that are really interesting and that fly, but for the most part this was just tough to read.

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M. A Newman

Is the Loneliest Night in the World

September 28, 2012

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a very interesting book. As is the case with works by Ian McEwan you spend a good portion of the book wondering when the explosion will occur. In a sense, McEwan is, in my opinion, attempting to reflect modern anxieties.

This is very much a story of haves vs have nots. Reason vs emotion. It probably will appeal more to Blue States than Red Staters even though it is set in the UK with a pre-Iraq War demonstration as its back drop.

The book deals with the rational world of Henry Perowne, a 48 year old neurosurgeon, married to a lawyer with a daughter who is poet and son who is a jazz musician. It is a rational, comfortable world that because of one instance in the book is bedeviled by the irrational forces that put liberal society at risk on a daily basis. The veneer of civilization is quite thin indeed, regardless of what we imagine. The world is full of ticking time bombs, be they terrorism, crime, or mental disorders.

I am not sure how I would have felt about it, had I read this book nearer its publication date. The rush to war in Iraq, which is depicted in the book seems like a flight into madness and irrational thought. There is no way McEwan could have imagined the full extent of the difficulties in waging war in another part of the world with a different history. The outcome for the Perowne family is much easily resolved. However, I think that McEwan does a great deal in defining what the stakes are and the contemporary threats to civilization.

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