Saturday is a novel set within a single day -- 15 February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children, who are young adults. What troubles him is the state of the world - the 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 makes his way to his usual squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousand 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 called Baxter. To Perowne's professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man. Baxter, in his turn, believes the surgeon has humiliated him, and visits the opulent Perowne home that evening, during a family reunion - with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep this doomed figure alive.
McEwan was born in Aldershot in England and spent much of his childhood in the East Asia, Germany and North Africa where his father, an officer in the army, was posted. He was educated at the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia, where he was the first graduate of Malcolm Bradbury's pioneering creative writing course.
McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. Among the many litarary prizes are the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories "First Love, Last Rites"; Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for "The Child in Time"; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction three times, winning the award for "Amsterdam" in 1998. His novel "Atonement" received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the "European Novel" (2004). He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The 1997 novel “Enduring Love”, investigating the unsettling relationship between a science journalist and an obsessive stalker, made McEwan a pioneer setting the golden standard for the so-called neuronovel. “Atonement” (2001), turned quickly into an Oscar-winning movie, made him a global celebrity. Both commercially and critically acclaimed, Ian McEwan just won the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, a prize that validates him once again as a contemporary humanist, whose work still challenges the limits of our senses and sensibilities in this forever changing world.
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