On Chesil Beach

Now the inspiration for a major new film, adapted for the screen by Ian McEwan

And they had so many plans, giddy plans, heaped up before them in the misty future, as richly tangled as the summer flora of the Dorset coast, and as beautiful.

It is July 1962.

Edward and Florence, young innocents married that morning, arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their private fears of the wedding night to come and, unbeknownst to them both, the events of the evening will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

One of Ian McEwan’s most achingly moving and expertly honed novels, On Chesil Beach is a masterpiece of miscommunication and mistaken intent.

Set in the borderland of English history immediately before the liberation and licence of the swinging sixties, McEwan reveals how a life can be irrevocably altered by a moment’s twist of fate.

'On Chesil Beach is more than an event. It is a masterpiece' - Times Literary Supplement