Enduring Love (McEwan)

Enduring Love 
Ian McEwan, 1997
Random House
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385494144


Summary
Considered by many critics to be the novel that should have won Ian McEwan the Booker Prize, Enduring Love is an extraordinary exploration of love, faith, and obsession, the story of two delicately ordered lives thrown out of balance by a desperate, deranged passion.

Joe Rose is a scientist by training and a science writer by trade. Though he has a secure, loving relationship with his wife, Clarissa, the stillborn specter of the scientific career he might have had still haunts him. Clarissa also has her ghosts—those of the children a medical mishap has left her unable to bear.

Despite these disappointments, they have established a careful emotional equilibrium between themselves and their professional lives. But while hiking through the Chiltern Hills one windy spring afternoon, Joe and Clarissa become unscripted players in a hot-air balloon tragedy that leaves one would-be rescuer dead and saddles Joe with the ardent and unwanted attentions of a disturbed young man. (From the publisher.)