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Day in the life... This is an unusual novel and it is not easy to explain why it is so enjoyable. On the face of it not much happens. It is about one Saturday in the life of Henry Perowne, a renowned neurosurgeon. He wakes early and thinks he sees a terrorist act unfolding. He drives to his Saturday squash game and is involved in a very minor collision. He thus encounters the disturbing Baxter. He plays his game of squash. He buys some fish. He visits his mother and goes home to cook dinner for his family, his beautiful lawyer wife, his blues guitarist son, his daughter who is an aspiring poet and father in law who is a fading poet. That's about it. Until Baxter imposes himself, muscling in on their intimacy. What makes it so readable is the richness of the characters. Perowne dominates every page. We see him struggle with his tendency to view those he meets for a neurosurgical angle. So the tragedy of his mother is explained in terms of what is happening to her grey matter. Baxter too is seen as a potential patient as much as a threat. His daughter Daisy is passionate and literary and constantly encourages him to read. This leads them to a brilliant argument about the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war. The Saturday in question is the day of the great anti- war march in 2003. It is not a book about the march. The march is a backcloth. It is going on throughout the book - affecting traffic, attitudes and relationships. Ian McEwan does not judge on the rights and wrongs of the war. He is more concerned to show us how the differing attitudes affect his characters. I have become a McEwan convert. I was not impressed by Amsterdam. Enduring Love was a powerful and disturbing read. The similarity is that we see the intrusion of a disturbing figure into the domestic world where he does not belong. This is a more relaxed read than Enduring Love but equally recommended.