We hope the following questions and topics will enrich your experience of this provocative novel. This guide is designed to enhance your reading of Saturday. For this is the day his fears will become realized, and he will have to choose the best means of defense. With every tender encounterstolen moments with his wife, tea with his fragile mother, marvelous discussions with his grown childrenhe is looking over his shoulder. Yet, as much as Henry tries to enjoy an ordinary day, this is not meant to be a day of minor consequences.

And then his car scrapes against another, a fender-bender that should have had only minor consequences. Later, as Henry drives to a game of squash, anti-war protestors clog the streets. Newscasters deliver conflicting accounts of the incident. Before the sun is up, he sees fire glowing from an airplane as it lumbers above the Thames. But this particular day ripples with unexpected fears. Taking place over a single day, Saturday follows Henry as he copes with everyday quandaries: insomnia, aging, the quest for a moment of leisure in the midst of so many obligations. With intense precision, McEwan draws us into the life of London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. In Saturday, he has created a storyline that brings to bear the full weight of these facets in the contemporary world. Ian McEwan's fiction never fails to make us think a little differentlyabout humanity, and storytelling, and the beliefs that comprise our myth and memory.

Ian mc ewan saturday