The Comfort of Strangers [Paperback]

A vacationing English couple find more than they bargained for, in this unsettling novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Atonement.

Visiting an unnamed city, Mary and Colin attract the interest of Robert, a charismatic older man with a story to tell. But the more they get to know Robert—and his disabled wife, Caroline—the more apparent it becomes that there’s something not quite right about their new friends. A shocking work of violence and obsession,The Comfort of Strangersis Ian McEwan at his very best. 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(London)

As always, McEwan manages his own idiom with remarkable grace and inventiveness; his characters are at home in their dreams, and so is he. —The Guardian

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

“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.” —ObserverIan McEwan is the bestselling author of seventeen books, including the novels Nutshell; The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and