The Comfort of Strangers is the first book I’ve read from Ian McEwan and for the first time in years, I’ve found a book that crushed me. I realised I’d missed a lot while The Comfort of Strangers was waiting on my shelves. This book managed to break me not because I’ve found myself in it. Or not because I’m in love with the story. It was the ending. I felt like I’ve hit my head fast on the wall. It was amazing.
Who doesn’t like unexpected endings anyway? Everybody loves them, but the end of this book has nothing to love. When the book finished, I found myself cursing and running around the house like a headless chicken. My husband still remembers how I looked.
Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour, and even the precise manner in which they became lost expressed their cumulative choices, their will.
Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers
This tiny book, which you can finish in one sitting, may change your life in hours. Well, not entirely, but it will stay with you for a long time. I don’t know anyone who read the book and wasn’t as impressed. If you don’t want to read it, there’s a movie as well. I haven’t seen it yet, but if it’s anything like the book, it should be amazing. Give this book a chance; Ian McEwan is an exciting writer.
About the book: The Comfort of Strangers
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
About the author: Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwan CBE FRSA FRSL is an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945” and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the “100 most powerful people in British culture”.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
