Ian McEwan

Michael Beard was awarded the Nobel Prize when he was barely in his twenties. He himself cannot fathom the reasons for such a prestigious accolade (perhaps the committee confused him with Sir Michael Bird?), but ever since, > like a castaway, he had clung to this solitary plank, seeing himself as a privileged being . The novel has little to do with science and solar energy; rather, it primaril

*Disguises*—in Italian, *travestimenti*—is a short story centered on the theme of disguise as an ambiguous game leading to the distortion of reality and of the self. Henry, a ten-year-old boy, is orphaned and goes to live with his aunt, a former actress. The boy is made to undergo an evening ritual in which the two dress up and perform the roles inherent to their assumed appearances. It is a ga

Like much of McEwan’s fiction, we are confronted at the outset with an extraordinary event (in this case, the death of a person falling from a hot-air balloon) that brings profound upheaval to a life that seemed quiet and settled: the couple’s relationship enters a crisis, an undercurrent of paranoia and instability emerges within the protagonist, and his professional choices are called into quest

Henry is a neurosurgeon living in London with his wife, a lawyer, and two children: his son, a musician, and his daughter, a poet temporarily living in Paris. He wakes up one Saturday morning, watches an airplane make an emergency landing from his window, and imagines it to be an act of terrorism. Thus begins Saturday, a day shaped both by broader events (television news reports on the impending