Ian McEwan remains one of my favorite writers working today, and On Chesil Beach provides testament as to why. As with his previous books, detail is key. McEwan places the reader so solidly in the story that it feels as though you're standing right alongside the main characters.

The novella centers around a brand new married couple and the events of their wedding night. The story is set in the late 50s, when sexual mores were obviously significantly different than they are today. Both husband and wife have serious hangups and fears going into the big night, and we flash forward and backward to see the evolution of their relationship. The story is brutally realistic, but beautifully told. McEwan is able to write sentences so sublime that they require reading and re-reading. As with all McEwan novels on my list, this one is highly recommended.

For anyone who ever cried at the prospect of reading a painstakingly detailed novel, Ian McEwan's Saturday will not be a great selection. For that matter, none of McEwan's novels would be a good choice, as he immerses himself into the environment about which he is writing and graphically illustrates that world. In Saturday, that world belongs to a neurosurgeon whose Saturday becomes eventful fairly early on when he has a car accident with some thugs.

Frankly, the plot of the book is fairly immaterial to the overall experience of reading Saturday. I know that is strange to say, but I speak the truth. While the plot that interweaves main character Henry Perowne and his thug Baxter is the backbone of the novel, Saturday is really about how we experience all of our days since the events of 9/11. He thoughtfully posits that we will never look at an airplane flying through the sky in the same way again (it's true). There is that constant fear that we will turn on the television to something catastrophic. Even the news channels have adjusted their programming to this notion, with the crawling scrollbars at the bottom of the screen that are ready to announce BREAKING! NEWS! AT! ANY! MOMENT! It's a devastating reality.