Black Dogs

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Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Black Dogs is the intimate story of the crumbling of Bernard and June Tremaine’s marriage, as witnessed by their son-in-law, Jeremy, who seeks to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences that seem irreconcilable. In writing June’s memoirs, Jeremy is led back to a moment, that was, for June, as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy’s own time. Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civilization’s darkest moods—its black dogs—with the tensions that both create love and destroy it.Praise for Black Dogs:

“A terrifyingly beautiful political allegory in the form of a sublimely readable novel.” —Ottawa Citizen

“[McEwan is] a master of menace, an excavator of the jagged fissures that lie just under civilization’s crust . . . anxious to identify the cracked steps, the crucibles of experience that jolt individuals, for better or worse, out of their moral skins. . . . McEwan’s preoccupation with menace is revealed as part of a larger preoccupation with humanity.” —Los Angeles Times

“Masterful and moving. . . . It is a story of the fragile nobility of the human spirit in the face of the irrational, the terrible and the miraculous.” —The Washington Post

“McEwan’s best yet, which I should make clear issaying a great deal.” —The Observer (UK)

“Superbly evocative prose. . . The novel’s visionof Europe is acute and alive, vivid in itsmoral complexities.” —New York Times Book Review

“Black Dogs claws at us with images and phrases that seize the eye and mind . . . [it] continues [McEwan’s] career trajectory from young purveyor of psychological shock to adroit painter of political and moral grimness.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“McEwan’s cinematic images possess the gathering momentum of the montage in a Hitchcock thriller, and McEwan handles them with virtuosic brilliance.” —Boston Globe

“Each scene is brilliantly lit, and has a characteristically strange fascination as Ian McEwan juxtaposes ‘huge and tiny currents’ to show the ways in which individuals react to history.” —New York Review of Books

“McEwan has constructed an intricate puzzle, piecing together the need for both social action and spiritual contemplation, and passions of lovers and misunderstandings of families . . . Beautifully written and absorbing . . . a wonderful novel.” —Los Angeles ReaderIAN McEWAN is the critically acclaimed author of many novels and two collections of short stories. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen. He was awarded a CBE in 2000.When you read Ian McEwan’s most recent novel, Amsterdam, you’ll understand why it won the Booker Prize. When you read his earlier works, you’ll wonder why he didn’t win it sooner.

The four McEwan novels—Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam, Enduring Love, Black Dogs, and The Innocent—included in this Reading Group Companion, showcase the author’s range and skill as he delivers unlikely, and welcome, combinations of suspense, ethics, philosophy, and political and religious ideology. In lesser hands, such a mix might be lethal. In McEwan’s, it’s intoxicating.

1. Can a person be happy when evil exists in the world? Is this novel a warning to be on guard?

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