The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan Paperback Book

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As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though there waits someone who cares deeply about how they appear. Then they meet a man with a disturbing story to tell and become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession.

FORMATPaperback CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

Re-jacketed in stunning new series style, The Comfort of Strangers is the second novel from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling Ian McEwan.Rediscover the classic novel of love, violence and obsessions from Booker prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan.Colin and Mary are a couple whose intimacy knows no bounds. Away on a holiday together in a nameless city, they get lost one evening in a labyrinth of streets and canals. They happen upon Robert, a stranger with a dark history, who takes them to a bar and ushers them down into a subterranean land of violence and obsession.'Haunting and compelling' The Times'No reader will begin The Comfort of Strangers and fail to finish it; a black magician is at work' New York Times

Notes

A reversion from Picador, new in Vintage paperback.

Author Biography

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; and Nutshell, which was a Number One bestseller. Atonement and Enduring Love have both been turned into award-winning films, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach are in production and set for release this year, and filming is currently underway for a BBC TV adaptation of The Child in Time.

Review

Haunting and compelling * The Times *No reader will begin The Comfort of Strangers and fail to finish it; a black magician is at work * New York Times *This compelling, driven novel explores what it might be like to lose yourself forever * Guardian *His writing is exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing * The Times *McEwan, that master of the taciturn macabre, so organises his narrative that, without insisting anything, every turn and glimpse is another tightening of the noose * Observer *

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'Haunting and compelling' - The Times

Kirkus UK Review

Locked into a soporific and uneasy kind of intimacy Colin and Mary share an unspoken desire to be released. They holiday, desperately, in a slumbering Mediterrenean town and in the stagnant heat remain in their hotel room grooming themselves compulsively. When they do venture out they loose their bearings in the towns labrynthine streets and, wandering lost, encounter an energetic and insistant stranger with a story to tell. The tourniquet tightens... (Kirkus UK)

Kirkus US Review

The Ian McEwan paradox continues. As before (The Cement Garden, In Between the Sheets), he writes some of the cleanest, most sparely seductive narration this side of Graham Greene. Also as before, what his page-by-page craft sweeps you along to is a virtual dead end: a kinky, symbolic sexual situation which is neither effective as storytelling nor freshly resonant as metaphor. Here he follows an unmarried English couple, Colin and Mary, on vacation in an unnamed, Venice-like city. They are beautiful, bright, liberated, a bit androgynous, and having a mostly miserable time. Then, one night, wandering the streets in search of a restaurant, they meet Robert - a wealthy native (though London-bred) who squires them about, regales them with tales of his childhood (strict training in old-fashioned European sex roles), and spirits them off to his splendid villa. . . where his demure, smiling Canadian wife Adrienne seems to be in constant pain, perhaps a prisoner. Other oddnesses accumulate as well: Robert, who seems at least latently homosexual, punches Colin in the stomach after delivering a tirade on the misery caused by today's sex-role confusion; Mary sees a secretly-snapped photo of Colin on Robert's wall. But the lovers continue - with exasperating passivity (or have they been drugged?) - to hang around with these weirdos. . . until it's too late: Adrienne confesses her sadomasochistic conjugal life (Robert even broke her back); Colin becomes the sex/death sacrifice of the odd couple; and Mary is left to announce McEwan's theme - "how the imagination, the sexual imagination, men's ancient dreams of hurting, and women's of being hurt, embodied and declared a powerful single organizing principle, which distorted all relations, all truth." Plausible psycho-sociology, perhaps - but a thunderingly clunky ending to a novella whose first half promises important fiction. So, once again, McEwan seems to be a huge talent constricted by the need to preach, philosophize, or work out private obsessions; and one can only hope that writing beguiling but disappointing essay-stories like this one will free him to write more wide-ranging, full-visioned fiction in the future. (Kirkus Reviews)

Review Text

Haunting and compelling

Review Quote

"As the best young writer on this island, McEwan's evocations of feeling and place and his analysis of mood and relationship remain haunting and compelling."-The Times "As always, McEwan manages his own idiom with remarkable grace and inventiveness; his characters are at home in their dreams, and so is he."-Guardian "His writing is exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing."-The Times "The Maestro."-New Statesman "McEwan has-a style and a vision of life of his own...No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary Britain can afford not to read him."-John Fowles "A sparkling and adventurous writer."-Dennis Potter "Haunting and compelling." The Times "McEwan, that master of the taciturn macabre, so organizes his narrative that, without insisting anything, every turn and glimpse is another tightening of the noose. The evils of power and the power of evil are transmitted with a steely coolness, and in a prose that has a feline grace." Observer

Promotional "Headline"

Re-jacketed in stunning new series style, The Comfort of Strangers is the second novel from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times- bestselling Ian McEwan.

Details ISBN0099754916 Author Ian McEwan ISBN-10 0099754916 ISBN-13 9780099754916 Format Paperback Imprint Vintage Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom DEWEY 823.914 Birth 1948 Media Book Series Vintage Books Publisher Vintage Publishing Year 1997 Pages 176 Publication Date 1997-06-05 UK Release Date 1997-06-05 AU Release Date 1997-06-05 NZ Release Date 1997-06-05 Audience General Alternative 9781409089865 We've got this

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