Their marriage, they believe, will bring them happiness, the confidence and the freedom to fulfill their true destinies. The glowing promise of the future, however, cannot totally mask their worries about the wedding night. Edward, who has had little experience with women, frets about his sexual prowess. Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by conflicting emotions and a fear of the moment she will surrender herself.
From the precise and intimate depiction of two young lovers eager to rise above the hurts and confusion of the past, to the touching story of how their unexpressed misunderstandings and fears shape the rest of their lives, On Chesil Beach is an extraordinary novel that brilliantly, movingly shows us how the entire course of a life can be changed – by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
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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