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Saturday
A Novel
by Ian McEwan
The Booker Prize-winning author of Atonement returns with a novel set during a single Saturday in February 2003, as a car accident sets up a confrontation between a London neurosurgeon and a troubled man on the eve of the Iraq War.
Nan A. Talese, 304 pages
03/22/2005
$26.00
ISBN: 0385511809
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Atlantic Monthly Christopher Hitchens
With this novel the soft and the hard McEwan come into an exquisite balance.
Chicago Sun-Times Randy Michael Signor
This is a stunning novel, its subtle depth surprisingly affecting, its voice both warm and troubled
Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse
In his new novel, "Saturday," the marvelously gifted Ian McEwan turns a single day into nearly 24 hours emblematic of an entire era.
Daily Telegraph Lewis Jones
[Saturday] offers a detailed portrait of an age, of how we live now, and... it offers more, something transcendent, impossible to dissect.
Kirkus Reviews
A sort of middle-class humanist manifesto: when you find yourself fortunate beyond all measure in a random universe, gratitude, generosity, and compassion are a decent response.
Los Angeles Times Michael Gorra
McEwan's prose is without flamboyance, and yet every other sentence seems to offer an arresting phrase.
Publishers Weekly
[A] wise and poignant portrait of the way we live now.
Salon Allen Barra
Saturday showcases McEwan's almost effortless gift for weaving contrapuntal themes into a narrative: the relationship between rationality and creativity, the survival of happiness in the wake of incalculable violence, the necessity for fiction in a world of fact. All shadow the story without intrusion.
Sydney Morning Herald Malcolm Knox
By limiting himself to the goings-on in the mind of a man who is both solitary and deeply connected with his world, McEwan has taken on a brave challenge. Can he rely on his tools alone, without an ambitious narrative to distract and delight the reader and allow forgiveness if McEwan falls short? Are his gifts as a stylist and psychologist good enough? Saturday says yes, and not just good enough, but something far greater.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Michael Helm
The true wonder of Saturday is not what it's about, but what it is. [19 Feb. 2005, D6]
The Independent James Urquhart
McEwan's superb novel amply demonstrates how good fiction, by dramatising unwieldy and fraught ideas in a deeply personal narrative, can fashion the world into gobbets sometimes more digestible than factual reportage.
The Independent Marek Kohn
Saturday lives up to its own standards throughout. Its author's scrupulous application of his talent merits real gratitude from its readers. Saturday is distinguished by an intense literary imagination that is fundamentally scientific in its vision and its criteria.
The Nation Lee Siegel
This extraordinary book is not a political novel. It is a novel about consciousness that illuminates the sources of politics.
The Spectator Anita Brookner
Saturday is an exemplary novel, engrossing and sustained. It is undoubtedly McEwan's best.
Village Voice Dennis Lim
The novel is most provocative as a philosophical inquiry into happiness--though even in this capacity, it tends toward a defeated conservatism.
Wall Street Journal George Sim Johnston
[McEwan's] novel "Saturday" is characteristically somber but at the same time oddly buoyant. It puts you through the ringer, but you profit from the experience.
The New Republic James Wood
Reading McEwan, there are times when one feels that the extreme narrative order--his clean joins and hinges--have been purchased at too high a cost to credibility, and sometimes even to animation and free life... But one will forgive much when prose is as good as this.
The Onion A.V. Club Nan A. Talese
Even if the choices made in 2003 prove catastrophic in the years to come, Saturday has been designed as a comforting reminder of how we once lived.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Though "Saturday" is too indebted to "Mrs. Dalloway" to resonate with the fierce originality of the author's last book, "Atonement," it's clear that with this volume, Mr. McEwan has not only produced one of the most powerful pieces of post-9/11 fiction yet published, but also fulfilled that very primal mission of the novel: to show how we - a privileged few of us, anyway - live today.
The Guardian Mark Lawson
One of the most oblique but also most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature, it succeeds in ridiculing on every page the view of its hero that fiction is useless to the modern world.
San Francisco Chronicle David Wiegand
An unfortunate few times, the book reads as medical text. At others, McEwan's writing is sublime and poetic, even if we have to look up some of the words.
Slate Stephen Metcalf
For all its economy and topicality--9/11 and the Iraq war lurk behind every page--Saturday is a deeply English novel, a beautiful book presided over... by a longing for the old village virtues of peace and continuity.
PopMatters Jeff Gomez
In Saturday McEwan gives us in a few hundred pages -- not a life -- but a day, and he does it brilliantly.
Library Journal Barbara Hoffert
McEwan has done his job: the tension is palpable, the narrative tightly knit, and each character beautifully drawn.
London Review Of Books Christopher Tayler
The customarily firm forward march of the narrative works surprisingly well with the more spaced-out requirements of a day-in-the-life story, and at its best the combination of precision and lyricism is very effective.
Daily Telegraph Caroline Moore
This is a rich book, sensuous and thoughtful.
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
McEwan's novel ends with the hard-won virtues of forgiveness, familial love, and decency. It's not the grace found at the end of "Atonement," but there's something moving in the fact that Henry always can be counted on to do the decent thing.
Booklist Donna Seaman
McEwan is as provocative, transporting, and brilliant as ever as he considers both our vulnerability and our strength, particularly our ability to create sanctuary in a violent world. [15 Feb. 2005, p. 1036]
Boston Globe Anita Shreve
Few literary events are today met with as much enthusiasm as the publication of a McEwan novel. ''Saturday," a brilliant and graceful hymn to the contented contemporary man, will be greeted with cheers.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
[McEwan's] least frightening book yet. [8 April 2005, p. 68]
LA Weekly Brendan Bernhard
Saturday has many shrewd things to say about love, work, marriage, medicine, poetry, and how children do and do not turn out to resemble their parents... But too often the novel reads like a series of leisurely, gently fictionalized essays.
The Economist
"Saturday" is not a McEwan masterpiece: it is just a little too safe. But it is still hugely enjoyable for all that.
The New York Times Book Review Zoe Heller
Finely wrought and shimmering with intelligence though it is, it never quite fully submerges its thesis.
Washington Post Michael Dirda
Despite all its virtues, and these include some astonishing pages of description... Saturday still feels a little too artful, just a smidgen over-contrived.
USA Today Deirdre Donahue
There is no question that McEwan has a gift for writing. But compared with Atonement, Amsterdam and Enduring Love, among others, Saturday is a chore to read, bogged down by McEwan's political musings and obvious medical research.
New York Review Of Books John Banville
Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.--are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy.
 The average user rating for this book is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 22 User Votes
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