Winner of the Whitbread Award and the Booker Prize, Ian McEwan is one of the most highly regarded contemporary authors in the English language. A fictional memoir set in late 1980s Europe, Black Dogs contemplates individuals responding to vast impersonal forces. Orphaned at the age of eight, Jeremy finds the course of his life transient and groundless until he marries and begins writing a memoir of his wife's estranged parents.

Two parents come to appreciate the forces of love and time after the disappearance of their daughter, Kate.

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.

In 1946, a young English couple set off on their honeymoon. In a gorge in the mountains of southern France they encounter a vision of darkness so impenetrable that it alters their lives forever.

The Child in Time opens with a harrowing event. Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children's books, takes his three-year-old daughter on a routine Saturday morning trip to the supermarket. While waiting in line, his attention is distracted and his daughter is kidnapped. Just like that. From there, Lewis spirals into bereavement that has effects on his relationship with his wife, his psyche, and time itself.

The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and West, between past and present; comes 25-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life and to lose his unwanted innocence.

Set in Venice, two unsuspecting tourists, Colin and Mary, are vulnerable prey for those who know their way around. When searching for a restaurant, the couple encounters a polite man called Robert, who offers help, and they enjoy a night of story telling and drinking. Yet somehow they will meet him again, and become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession.

Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a successful neurosurgeon, devoted husband, and father of two grown-up children. Unusually, he wakes up before dawn, troubled about impending war in Iraq, and the fear that his city and happy family life are under threat. Later, Perowne makes his way through London streets filled with anti-war protesters. A minor car accident brings him in to contact with Baxter, an aggressive young man who is to change his life irrevocably.

In this contemporary morality tale, as profound as it is witty, two old friends meet to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence, one as Britain's most successful modern composer, the other as editor of a quality broadsheet.

One windy spring day in the Chilterns, Joe Rose's calm, organized life is shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon, Rose reflects, could have ended in mere tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry. Unknown to Rose, something passes between them, something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test to the limits Rose's beloved scientific rationalism, threaten the love of his wife Clarissa, and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.