The story itself isn't arresting, but the narrator's journey through it is.

A deeply poignant yet brief novel, McEwan’s On Chesil Beach broaches topics of physical intimacy, expectations, and failures of communication. Staying very close to this marital trauma and the circumstances surrounding it (particularly class), McEwan's flawless omniscient narration has a curious (and not unpleasantly condescending) fable-like quality, as if an older self were simultaneously disavowing and affirming a younger. The year is 1962, and a young couple at the very start of their honeymoon find themselves unravelling as each carries insecurities and hesitations that threaten to transform their lives forever. , etc.) goes into forensic detail about their naïve and disastrous efforts on the marriage bed, and the final chapter presents the couple's explosive postcoital confrontation on Chesil Beach. At the book's midpoint, McEwan ( Atonement Their fears about sex and their inability to discuss them form the story's center. Florence, daughter of a businessman and (a rarity then) a female Oxford philosophy professor, is intense but warm and has founded a string quartet. Edward is a rough-hewn but sweet student of history, son of an Oxfordshire primary school headmaster and a mother who was brain damaged in an accident when Edward was five. It opens on the anxious Dorset Coast wedding suite dinner of Edward Mayhew and the former Florence Ponting, married in the summer of 1963 at 23 and 22 respectively the looming dramatic crisis is the marriage's impending consummation, or lack of it. Not quite novel or novella, McEwan's masterful 13th work of fiction most resembles a five-part classical drama rendered in prose.

On chesil beach by ian mcewan