Saturday
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  • Published: 13 November 2014
  • ISBN: 9781473513877
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 9 hr 35 min
  • Narrator: James Wilby
  • RRP: $19.99

Saturday

Formats & editions
Paperback
5 Jan 2006
EBook
1 Jul 2010
Audiobook
13 Nov 2014
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A gripping novel centering around the London anti-war protest in 2003, from the Booker prize-winning author of Atonement and Enduring Love.

Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind and proud father of two grown-up children. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world - the impending war against Iraq, a gathering pessimism since 9/11, and a fear that his city and his happy family life are under threat.

Later, Perowne makes his way to his weekly squash game through London streets filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors. A minor car accident brings him into a confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive, young man, on the edge of violence. To Perowne's professional eye, there appears to be something profoundly wrong with him.

Towards the end of a day rich in incident and filled with Perowne's celebrations of life's pleasures, his family gathers for a reunion. But with the sudden appearance of Baxter, Perowne's earlier fears seem about to be realised.
  • Published: 13 November 2014
  • ISBN: 9781473513877
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 9 hr 35 min
  • Narrator: James Wilby
  • RRP: $19.99
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About the author

Ian McEwan

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; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

portrait photo of Ian McEwan

Also by Ian McEwan

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Penguin Readers Level 7: The Children Act (ELT Graded Reader)
Science
The Cockroach
Machines Like Me
My Purple Scented Novel
Nutshell
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Praise for Saturday

Refreshing and engrossing, dense with revelation. Superb

Independent on Sunday

Written with superb exactness, complex, suspenseful and humane, this novel.reinforces his status as the supreme novelist of his generation

Sunday Times

Dazzling. Profound and urgent

Observer

It's the good writing and the truthful and convincing way of rendering consciousness that makes Saturday so engrossing

Colm Toibin

Richly laden. McEwan pulls out all the stops. A rich book, sensuous and thoughtful. McEwan has found in Saturday the right form to showcase his dazzling talents

Sunday Telegraph

A book of great moral maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence... Everyone should read Saturday... Artistically, morally and politically, he excels

The Times

Saturday is wonderfully involving and affecting on every page. Everybody with any interest in contemporary literature will want to read it at once

Evening Standard

A brilliant novel.It is McEwan writing on absolute top form

Daily Mail

The supreme novelist of his generation

Sunday Times

He remains at the top of his game - assured, accomplished and ambitious

Daily Telegraph