• What's your favorite Ian McEwan novel? Contribute a comment or review.

Ian McEwan is the author of two collections of short stories (First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets) and nine novels: The Cement Garden; The Comfort of Strangers; The Child in Time; The Innocent; Black Dogs; The Daydreamer; Enduring Love; Amsterdam (which won the Booker Prize in 1998); and Atonement (which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 2003).



You need a strong stomach for some of his early novels, which are drenched in elegantly well-written violence (think about the early novels of Cormac McCarthy for a good comparison). He is wonderful at portraying the complexities of human relationships, including those between husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings, lovers, and the past and present. Although many readers believe that Atonement is his masterpiece, my favorite McEwan novel is Black Dogs, which describes the stormy marriage between June and Bernard Tremaine. Their fraught relationship begins during their honeymoon, when June is nearly attacked by two large, vicious black dogs. Or is she?

[Excerpted from Book Lust]