Other editions of book On Chesil Beach

The official movie tie-in edition of Ian McEwan's exquisite, bestselling novel: the basis for the major motion picture starring Saoirse Ronan, Emily Watson, Anne-Marie Duff, and Samuel West.England, 1962: Florence and Edward are celebrating their wedding in a hotel on the Dorset coast. Yet as they dine, the expectation of their marital duties become overwhelming. Unbeknownst to them both, the decisions they make this night will resonate throughout their lives. With exquisite prose, Ian McEwan creates a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken--and brilliantly illuminates the collision of sexual longing, deep-seated fears, and romantic fantasy on a young couple's wedding night.

It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence's response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence's anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite. Ian McEwan has caught with understanding and compassion the innocence of Edward and Florence at a time when marriage was presumed to be the outward sign of maturity and independence. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from McEwan: a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

This slim, subtle, and devastating novella from Ian McEwan uses surgical precision to expose the psychological slips and physical mischances that threaten to ruin a young couple's happiness on their wedding night. The novel is set in the early 1960's, in a time when sexuality still had an aura of the arcane and forbidden, and Edward and Florence's first sexual encounter has become a source of anxiety and apprehension for both of them, though for very different reasons. With an adroit touch, McEwan traces the interpersonal feints and parries between the two young lovers, and shows how the slightest action or inaction can make a life skid toward tragedy.