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Long Island by Colm Tóibín review – the sequel to Brooklyn is a masterclass in subtlety and intelligence

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Trailblazer: The First Feminist to Change Our World by Jane Robinson; A Dirty, Filthy Book by Michael Meyer – review

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience – review

The Men of 1924 by Peter Clark; The Wild Men by David Torrance review – Labour’s first taste of power

Judgement at Tokyo by Gary J Bass review – of war crimes and punishment

Blood: The Science, Medicine and Mythology of Menstruation by Dr Jen Gunter – why periods are ‘a muddled burden’

The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo review – a break for the border

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Reviews of Saturday by Ian McEwan

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

by Ian McEwan

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An astonishing novel that captures the fine balance of happiness and the unforeseen threats that can destroy it. A brilliant, thrilling page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

From the pen of a master — the #1 bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Atonement — comes an astonishing novel that captures the fine balance of happiness and the unforeseen threats that can destroy it. A brilliant, thrilling page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children. Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day off. He is as at ease here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before. On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne's day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary. After an unusual sighting in the early morning sky, he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug. To Perowne's professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man, who in turn believes the surgeon has humiliated him — with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep his family alive.

Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet. It's not clear to him when exactly he became conscious, nor does it seem relevant. He's never done such a thing before, but he isn't alarmed or even faintly surprised, for the movement is easy, and pleasurable in his limbs, and his back and legs feel unusually strong. He stands there, naked by the bed—he always sleeps naked—feeling his full height, aware of his wife's patient breathing and of the wintry bedroom air on his skin. That too is a pleasurable sensation. His bedside clock shows three forty. He has no idea what he's doing out of bed: he has no need to relieve himself, nor is he disturbed by a dream or some element of the day before, or even by the state of the world. It's as if, standing there in the darkness, he's materialised out of nothing, fully formed, ...

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Beyond the Book

Ian McEwan was born in 1948 in Aldershot, England, and now lives in London. His works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim, including being shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction three times, and winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. Bibliography

• First Love, Last Rites (stories) 1975
• In Between the Sheets (stories) 1978
• The Cement Garden , 1978
• The Comfort of Strangers , 1981
• The Imitation Game , 1981
• Or Shall We Die? , 1983
• The Ploughman's Lunch, 1985
• The Child in Time, 1987
• The Innocent, 1989
• Sour Sweet, 1989
• Black Dogs, 1992
• The Daydreamer, 1994 (children)
• Enduring...

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If you liked Saturday, try these:

Thirteen Ways of Looking

by Colum McCann

Published 2016

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In such acclaimed novels as Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic, National Book Award–winning author Colum McCann has transfixed readers with his precision, tenderness, and authority. Now, in his first collection of short fiction in more than a decade, McCann charts the territory of chance, and the profound and intimate consequences of ...

A Small Indiscretion

by Jan Ellison

With the emotional complexity of Everything I Never Told You and the psychological suspense of The Girl on the Train, O. Henry Prize winner Jan Ellison delivers a brilliantly paced, beautifully written debut novel about one woman's reckoning with a youthful mistake. Named one of the best books of the year by San Francisco Chronicle

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Henry Perowne's Saturday (15 February 2003) swells with the celebration of life's many pleasures. But Baxter, a fidgety young man on the edge of violence, places Perowne's happy life under threat.

London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. 279 p. (ISBN: 0224072994). [Limited, signed edition] London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. 279 p. (ISBN: 0224076876). New York: Nan A. Talese , 2005. 289 p. (ISBN: 0385511809). Toronto: Random House Canada, 2005. 279 p. (ISBN: 0676977618). New York: Random House Large Print, 2005. 418 p. (ISBN: 0375435328). Zaterdag . (trans. by Rien Verhoef). Amsterdam: De Harmonie, 2005. 327 p. (ISBN: 9061697476). [Dutch]. Shabat . (trans. by Semadar Milo). Tel Aviv: `Am `oved, 2005. 324 p. (ISBN: 9651318090). [Hebrew]. Sábado . (trans. by Jaime Zulaika). Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005. 328 p. (ISBN: 8433970763). [Spanish]. Sobota . (trans. by Andrzej Szulc). Warszawa: A.A. Kurylowicz, 2005. 319 p. (ISBN: 837359275X). [Polish]. Saturday . (trans. by Bernhard Robben). Zurich: Diogenes, 2005. 386 p. (ISBN: 3257064942). [German]. London: Vintage, 2006. 279 p. (ISBN: 0099469685). Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2006. 279 p. (ISBN: 0676977626). New York: Anchor Books, 2006. 289 p. (ISBN: 1400076196). Doyoobi (trans. by Taichi Koyama). Tokyo: Shincho-sha, 2007. 351 p. (ISBN-10: 4105900633 - softcover). Try your hand at preparing the dish featured in McEwan's best-selling novel Saturday . Presented in recipe format with slight revisions by McEwan .

Selected Reviews and Criticism

Weich, Dave. ' Ian McEwan, Reinventing Himself Still ', Powells.com, 1 April 2004. (Novel in progress at the time.) Graham-Harrison, Emma. ' McEwan Takes Scalpel to Anxiety in New Novel' , Reuters , 11 April 2004. (Novel in progress at the time.) Caminada, Carlos. ' Ian McEwan, Finishing New Novel, Ponders World After Sept. 11 ', Bloomberg.com, 16 July 2004. (Novel in progress at the time.) Page, Benedicte. 'A Happy Man in Wartime', The Bookseller , 25 November 2004. Cowell, Alan. ' Ian McEwan Hints at a Coming Novel ', New York Times , 6 December 2004: E3. [Free registration required.] 'Saturday', Kirkus Reviews , 15 January 2005. Cavendish, Lucy. 'Absent Parents, an Angry Ex, and a Curious Obsession with Dead Bodies', Evening Standard , 17 January 2005: 23. [Interview]. Lawson, Mark. ' Against the Flow ', The Guardian , 22 January 2005: 9. Freeman, John. ' Deft Knife Twist of Literary Anxiety ', Toronto Star , 22 January 2005: H13 [Profile / Interview; Reprinted as 'Pleasure and Pain', Vancouver Sun (British Columbia), 5 February 2005: D15; reprinted as 'Collateral Damage', Ottawa Citizen , 13 February 2005: C8; reprinted as 'Collateral Damage', The Calgary Herald (Alberta), 26 February 2005: G3; reprinted as 'McEwan Explores Anxiety's Hold on Pleasure', Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , 20 March 2005: C4; reprinted as 'Conscious Matter', Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 20 March 2005: Books 1; reprinted as 'Getting Inside a Man's Head', Hartford Courant (Connecticut), 20 March 2005: G2; reprinted as 'Talking with Ian McEwan', Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin), 20 March 2005: E6; reprinted as 'Novelist Juxtaposes Anxiety, Pleasure', Plain Dealer (Cleveland), 21 March 2005: D1]. Gerard, Jasper. ' The Conversion of Mr Macabre ', The Sunday Times , 23 January 2005: Review 5 [Interview]. McCrum, Robert. ' The Story of His Life ', The Observer, 23 January 2005: Review 5 [Profile]. Harrison, Sophie. ' Happy Families ', New Statesman , 24 January 2005: 48-49. Sexton, David. 'One Saturday after 9/11', Evening Standard , 24 January 2005: 69. O'Connell, John. 'Brain Storm', Time Out , 26 January 2005: 12-14. Hennessy, Val. 'The Enemy on Our Doorstep', Daily Mail (London), 28 January 2005: 55. Tonkin, Boyd. ' The Difference a Day Makes ', The Independent (London), 28 January 2005: 24-25; expanded version published as 'A Saturday in February', Belfast Telegraph , 5 February 2005 [Interview]. Brookner, Anita. 'A Day in the Life of a Surgeon', The Spectator , 29 January 2005: 38. Fray, Peter. ' The Enduring Talent of Ian McEwan ', The Age , 29 January 2005; also published in The Sydney Morning Herald . Hefner, Robert. 'Have Mercy: Subtle Study of Moral Sympathies', Canberra Times (Australia), 29 January 2005: A12. Hitchings, Henry. 'What a Difference a Day Makes', Financial Times (London), 29 January 2005: 29. Jones, Lewis. 'London, 15-02-03 (Novel of the Week)', Daily Telegraph (London), 29 January 2005: 9. Scurr, Ruth. ' Happiness on a Knife-edge ', Times (London), 29 January 2005: Review 13. Sorensen, Rosemary. 'From a Position of Trust', Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), 29 January 2005: M6. Adams, Tim. ' When Saturday Comes ', The Observer (London), 30 January 2005. Brown, Craig. 'The Thriller That's a Real Brainteaser', Mail on Sunday , 30 January 2005: 73. Deveney, Catherine. ' First Love, Last Writes ', Scotland on Sunday , 30 January 2005: 16 [Profile / Interview]. Kemp, Peter. ' Master of the Mind Game ', Sunday Times (London), 30 January 2005: 41. Moore, Caroline. 'A Brutal Invasion of Privacy', Sunday Telegraph (London), 30 January 2005: 12. Sharp, Iain. 'Saturday's All Right for Fighting', Sunday Star-Times (Auckland, New Zealand), 30 January 2005: 8. Urquhart, James. ' The Brain Inside the Skull Beneath the Skin ', Independent on Sunday (London), 30 January 2005: 30. 'PW Forcasts: Fiction', Publishers Weekly , 31 January 2005: 48. Kohn, Marek. ' Grandeur of the Mind Over Matter ', Independent (London), 4 February 2005: 28. 'March of the Day', Ham & High , 4 February 2005. Martin, Andrew. 'Day-in-the-Life Format Is a Fine Piece of Work', The Express , 4 February 2005: 54. Sutton, Henry. 'When Saturday Comes', The Mirror , 4 February 2005: 10. ' The Thinker ', The Economist , 5 February 2005. Adair, Tom. ' Anyone for Menace? ' Scotsman , 5 February 2005: 12. Battersby, Eileen. 'A Life in a Day', Irish Times , 5 February 2005: 12. Brice, Chris. 'A Day in the Life', The Advertiser , 5 February 2005: W09. Dening, Penelope. 'The Master of Literary Menace', Irish Times , 5 February 2005: 11 [Interview]. ' You Really Must Read... ', Sunday Times (London), 6 February 2005: 55. Cribb, Tim. 'Saturday', South China Morning Post , 6 February 2005: 8. Crumey, Andrew. ' Perils of Seizing the Day ', Scotland on Sunday , 6 February 2005: 8. Taylor, Alan. 'What a Difference a Day Makes', Sunday Herald , 6 February 2005 [Includes interview]. Tait, Theo. 'Ian McEwan's Longest Day', Times Literary Supplement , 9 February 2005. Bradley, James. ' A Detailed Life in the Day ', The Age , 12 February 2005. Gordon, Maxine. 'Saturday', This is York , 12 February 2005. Chong, Kevin. 'One Fine Day', Ottawa Citizen , 13 February 2005: C8. Marchand, Philip. ' One Day in the Life of Henry ', Toronto Star , 13 February 2005. Crompton, Sarah. ' Will Anyone Ever Say Anything Bad about Ian McEwan's Novel? ', Daily Telegraph (London), 16 February 2005: 23. Dohy, Leanne. 'Consciousness Examined: Novelist Puts One Day under a Sharp Lens ', The Calgary Herald (Alberta), 19 February 2005: G4. Helwig, David. 'An Eventful Day', The Gazette (Montreal), 19 February 2005: H1. Hollingshead, Greg. 'A Day Off, and Life Intrudes', National Post (Canada), 19 February 2005: WP12. Fysh, Eloise. 'Saturday: Ian McEwan', This is Wiltshire , 23 February 2005; reprinted in This is Hampshire , 26 February 2005. Wostear, Sam. 'Saturday', The Sun , 25 February 2005. 'Splendid Page Turner', Herald Express (Torquay), 26 February 2005: 24. Bethune, Brian. ' Mind Over Matter ', Maclean's (Canada), 28 February 2005: 47. Rosenheim, Andrew. 'The Voice of Modern British Fiction', Publishers Weekly , 28 February 2005: S16 [Interview]. Kirsch, Adam. ' A Thoughtful Novel for a Panicky Time ', The Sun (New York), 2 March 2005: 15. Tayler, Christopher. 'A Knife at the Throat', London Review of Books , 27:5, 3 March 2005: 31+. Bhowmick, Samyukta. ' A Day in the Life ', Business Standard , 4 March 2005. Simpson, Stuart. ' Walking among the Lonely Crowd ', Spiked , 4 March 2005. ' McEwan Aiming for "Documentary Sense" ', Globe and Mail , 5 March 2005 [Interview]. McKay, John. ' Saturday: Ian McEwan ', Canada.com , 8 March 2005. Schiefer, Nancy. 'Superb Prose Drives Compelling Tale of 24 Hours in Surgeon's Life', Edmonton Journal (Alberta), 6 March 2005: D11 [Reprinted as 'Some Days Are Just Like That', London Free Press (Ontario), 12 March 2005: D8]. Sands, Sarah. ' How Dare a Novelist Love His Wife? ', Telegraph , 12 March 2005. Morris, Paula. ' A Day in the Life ', New Zealand Listener , 12-18 March 2005. Fertile, Candace. 'McEwan Shows Brilliance in Plot, Characters and Dazzling Prose', Times Colonist (Victoria, British Columbia), 13 March 2005: D11. Gorra, Michael. 'Mind over Gray Matter', Los Angeles Times Book Review , 13 March 2005: 7. Schiff, James. 'A "Mrs. Dalloway" for Post-9/11 World', The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina), 13 March 2005: G5. Signor, Randy Michael. ' One Day in February: Metaphor for a Life ', Chicago Sun-Times , 13 March 2005: 13. Hoffert, Barbara. 'Saturday', Library Journal Reviews , 15 March 2005: 68. Lim, Dennis. ' The Life of Brain ', Village Voice , 15 March 2005. Kakutani, Michiko. ' A Hero With 9/11 Peripheral Vision ', New York Times , 18 March 2005: 37. Sen, Aveek. ' My City Square: Happiness Is a Hard Nut to Crack ', The Telegraph (Calcutta, India), 18 March 2005. Simon, Scott. 'Interview with Ian McEwan', NPR Weekend Edition , 19 March 2005 [ Listen to the interview online via the NPR Website ]. McKay, John. 'Spend a Lovely Saturday in London', Ottawa Sun , 19 March 2005: 45. Charbonneua, Jean. ' A Doomsday Scenario ', Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin), 20 March 2005: E6. Dirda, Michael. 'Shattered', Washington Post Book World , 20 March 2005: T1, 15. Heller, Zoe. ' One Day in the Life ', New York Times Book Review , 20 March 2005: 1. Hoover, Bob. 'A Clockwork Novel', Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , 20 March 2005: C4. Levasseur, Jennifer. 'One Fine Day', Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 20 March 2005: Books 6. McCarthy, Sean L. 'Mind Over Matters Is Brit Doc's Mantra', Boston Herald , 20 March 2005: 46. McGee, Celia. 'Time's Arrow', Daily News (New York), 20 March 2005: 18. Miller, Gregory. 'Saturday, Bloody Saturday', San Diego Union-Tribune , 20 March 2005: Books 1. Shreve, Anita. 'Day Tripper', Boston Globe , 20 March 2005: D6. Wakefield, Richard. 'A Day Like No Other Ticks Away', The Seattle Times , 20 March 2005: K8. Wiegand, David. 'Nowhere Man', San Francisco Chronicle , 20 March 2005: E1. Gates, David. ' Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting ', Newsweek , 21 March 2005: 60. Lacayo, Richard. 'A Day In The Life', Time Magazine , 21 March 2005: 70. Zipp, Yvonne. 'One Wild Day in a Doctor's Life', Christian Science Monitor , 22 March 2005: 15. Donahue, Deirdre. 'Sleepy Saturday Is No Sunday Picnic', USA Today , 24 March 2005: 5D. Bateman, Geoffrey. 'Exquisite Post-9/11 Tale', Rocky Mountain News (Denver), 25 March 2005: 24. Bernhard, Brendan. '24', LA Weekly , 25 March 2005: 42. Dubail, Jean. 'A Long Trip to a Happy Finish Stifles Saturday ', Plain Dealer (Cleveland), 25 March 2005: E1. 'McEwan's Saturday : One Heck of a Start to the Weekend', Chattanooga Times Free Press (Tennessee), 27 March 2005: F6. Baker, Jeff. 'Woke Up, Fel Out of Bed, Saw a Plane', Sunday Oregonian (Portland, Oregon), 27 March 2005: D6. Barra, Allen. 'Living through Saturday', Houston Chronicle , 27 March 2005: 19. Freeman, John. 'Mystery, Terror Coexist in Provocative Novel of Consciousness', St. Louis Post-Dispatch , 27 March 2005: E8. Herman, Carol. 'When Love and Terror Meet', Washington Times , 27 March 2005: B6. Littwin, Mike. 'Dread Clock', Baltimore Sun , 27 March 2005: 8. Phillips, Jeb. ' Saturday : Novel Continues Impressive Streak', Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), 27 March 2005: 7. Begley, Adam. 'Sage of Anxiety', New York Observer , 28 March 2005: 1. McGrath, Charles. 'A Literary Star Who Finds Art in Happiness, Not Pain', New York Times , 31 March 2005: E1. Hitchens, Christopher. 'Civilization and Its Malcontents', Atlantic Monthly , April 2005. Beale, Lewis. 'Ian McEwan Still a Virtuoso in Playing on Readers' Fears', Los Angeles Times , 1 April 2005: E1. Cox, Christopher. 'Homeland Insecurity', Boston Herald , 1 April 2005: E29. Sibree, Bron. 'Stretching the Luck', Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), 2 April 2005: M6. Lythgoe, Dennis. 'McEwan at His Best in Saturday ', Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City), 3 April 2005. Muchnick, Laure. 'The Age of Anxiety', Newsday (New York), 3 April 2005: C27. Murray, Steve. 'Post-9/11 Fiction: Family's Bliss Survives Threat of Violence', Atlanta Journal-Constitution , 3 April 2005: 8. Fischer, Pascal. 'Literature and Medicine in Ian McEwan's Saturday ' The Writing Cure: Literature and Medicine in Context . Eds. Alexandra Lembert-Heidenreich and Jarmila Mildorf. Münster: LIT, 2013, 95-111.  

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Long Island by Colm Tóibín review – happy ever after?

The Irish novelist is at the height of his powers with a sequel to Brooklyn, set twenty years later

A sked recently why he had chosen to write a sequel to his much-loved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín said, “The answer is why not? The other answer is that there are very good reasons not. I mean, leave it alone – why interfere with people’s imaginations about what happens to the characters? Also, and this is not true for Hilary Mantel or The Godfather, but in general sequels tend to be pale.”

Not this one. While Tóibín’s palette may be rather lighter on vermilion than Puzo’s – or indeed Mantel’s – Long Island is anything but pale. As for the characters, it is pure pleasure to be back in their absorbingly complex company.

Twenty years have passed since Eilis sailed for America for the second time, leaving local Enniscorthy barman Jim Farrell to return to Brooklyn and Tony Fiorello, the plumber to whom she was already secretly married. Since then she has not once gone back to Ireland. She and Tony live with their two teenage children on Long Island, in a suburban cul-de-sac built for the family by the Fiorello brothers. It is a stiflingly close-knit arrangement. Eilis’s in-laws can “almost see in through her windows”. Tony and his brothers work together. Their wives and children are constantly in and out of each other’s homes. Every Sunday the whole clan gathers for long noisy lunches. For Eilis, now in her 40s and the only one not of Italian extraction, the lack of privacy is sometimes unendurable. It is only slowly that she has carved a kind of peace for herself within it.

That peace is smashed to pieces in the opening pages of Long Island when a stranger, an Irish customer of Tony’s, turns up on her doorstep. Tony’s plumbing, he informs her, has proved “too good”. His wife is expecting Tony’s baby. Since the Irishman has no intention of raising a “plumber’s brat”, when the child is born, he will leave it on their doorstep. Recognising his obduracy – “She had known men like this in Ireland” – Eilis has no doubt that he means what he says. As the baby’s birth approaches and the question of its future remains unresolved, she seizes on her mother’s 80th birthday as a pretext to return to Ireland for the summer with her children.

Her decision, the mirror image of her flight in Brooklyn, leads her directly back towards the road not taken. In Enniscorthy little has changed. Gentle, serious Jim Farrell still runs the pub and has never married. Eilis’s old friend Nancy, five years widowed, manages the chip shop. The town is as cramped by convention as it always was. It is Eilis with her transatlantic gloss who is different, marked out by her clothes, her hair, the unpardonable extravagance of her shiny rental car. Her children don their Irish heritage like a local costume, exuberantly, but Eilis, whose Irishness in Long Island has always set her apart, has become an outsider.

Tóibín is the consummate cartographer of the private self, summoning with restrained acuity (and a delicious streak of sly humour) the thoughts his characters struggle to find words for, those parts of themselves that remain resolutely out of their reach. Eilis has grown more self‑possessed since Brooklyn, more direct in the American style, coolly capable of negotiating with her boss and standing up to her mother-in-law, but the habit of silence is hardwired in her. Back in her mother’s house she is as disoriented by longing as she was 20 years before, but in middle age it is a longing that must somehow accommodate the life she has already made, a life that no longer begins and ends with the self. It is no accident that, while the triangular story of Brooklyn was told exclusively from Eilis’s point of view, Long Island shares the close third-person narrative between Eilis, Jim and Nancy, drawing us deeply into the hearts of all three as they move inexorably towards a reckoning. There can be no happy ever after, not when happiness can be won only at the cost of another.

After its explosive opening, Long Island unfolds in a series of small events: a shopping trip to Dublin, a walk on a beach, a wedding. People gossip. Enniscorthy is not a place where secrets can be kept. Much of the novel’s tension comes from the excruciating certainty that the steady accretion of small deceptions can only continue for so long, that sooner or later the delicate balance will be broken, and yet, when it comes, the breaking strikes like lightning, unexpected and shattering. This deceptively quiet novel is the work of a writer at the height of his considerable powers, a story of ordinary lives that contains multitudes. In general, it is true, sequels are pale things, but the exceptions to the rule are glorious, contriving both to satisfy on their own terms and to deepen the reader’s relationship with the book that came before. Long Island can safely count itself among their number.

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Jenny Erpenbeck’s ‘Kairos’ Wins the International Booker Prize

Translated by Michael Hofmann, it’s the first novel originally written in German to win the major literary award.

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By Alex Marshall

Reporting from London

Jenny Erpenbeck’s “ Kairos ,” a novel about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won on Tuesday the International Booker Prize, the renowned award for fiction translated into English.

Erpenbeck shares the award of 50,000 British pounds, about $63,500, with Michael Hofmann, who translated the book into English. The pair received the prize during a ceremony at the Tate Modern art museum in London.

After receiving the award, the pair seemed lost for words. Erpenbeck thanked Hofmann, and Hofmann thanked Erpenbeck: “I want to thank Jenny for her trust in me,” he said. “Er, that’s about the size of it.”

Eleanor Wachtel, the chair of the judges, said in a news conference that “Kairos” was more than a simple evocation of a romance. The “self-absorption of the lovers” — a student and a 50-something novelist — and “their descent into a destructive vortex” tracks the history of East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she said.

Like that country, Wachtel added, the couple’s relationship “starts with optimism and trust, then unravels so badly.”

“What makes ‘Kairos’ so unusual is that it’s both beautiful and uncomfortable, personal and political, psychological and very moving,” Wachtel said. The judging panel deliberated for half an hour before deciding to give “Kairos” the prize, she added.

“Kairos” beat five other shortlisted titles , including Jente Posthuma’s “What I’d Rather Not Think About,” translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey, about a woman grieving her twin brother, and Hwang Sok-yong’s “Mater 2-10,” translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae, which traces North and South Korean history through a family of railway workers.

After its publication in English last year, some reviewers praised “Kairos” as the latest novel to suggest Erpenbeck could be a future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dwight Garner, in The New York Times , said that Erpenbeck was “among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have.” “Kairos,” he added, was so moving it had “a subterranean force.”

“I don’t generally read the books I review twice,” Garner said, “but this one I did.”

Established in 2005, the International Booker Prize is separate from the Booker Prize, which recognizes fiction written in English. Originally awarded for a writer’s entire body of work, in 2016 the international prize became an annual award for the best novel translated into English. Past winners have included Han Kang’s “ The Vegetarian, ” translated from Korean by Deborah Smith, and Olga Tokarczuk’s “ Flights ,” translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft.

Erpenbeck is the first German novelist to win the award, while Hofmann is the first male translator to receive the honor.

Erpenbeck, 57, grew up in Berlin in what was then the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, and the country has provided either a setting or context for much of her fiction, including 2017’s “ Go, Went, Gone ” about a professor befriending a group of African refugees in present day Berlin.

In a recent interview with The Times , Erpenbeck said that the tumult around the Berlin Wall’s collapse led to her becoming a writer, as she grappled with what it meant to lose “the system that I knew, that I grew up in.”

Stories about the fall of the Berlin Wall focus on the idea of freedom, Erpenbeck said in a recent interview for the Booker Prize’s website , but that was “not the only” story that could be told.

“Kairos,” she added, was “also about what follows the happy end.”

Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London. More about Alex Marshall

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Saturday: Ian Mcewan Paperback – 5 Jan. 2006

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'Dazzling... Profound and urgent' Observer 'A book of great maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence... Everyone should read Saturday' Financial Times Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon, stands at his bedroom window before dawn and watches a plane - ablaze with fire like a meteor - arcing across the London sky. Over the course of the following day, unease gathers about Perowne, as he moves amongst hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors in the post-9/11 streets. A minor car accident brings him into confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive man, who to Perowne's professional eye appears to be profoundly unwell. But it is not until Baxter makes a sudden appearance at the Perowne family home that Henry's earlier fears seem about to be realised...

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date 5 Jan. 2006
• Dimensions 21.6 x 13.8 x 1.84 cm
• ISBN-10 0099469685
• ISBN-13 978-0099469681
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From the back cover, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; 1st edition (5 Jan. 2006)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0099469685
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099469681
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 21.6 x 13.8 x 1.84 cm
• 1,024 in Political Fiction (Books)
• 3,650 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
• 14,837 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

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