Enduring Love By Ian McEwan
"Enduring Love" is a novel by award winning writer Ian McEwan, first published in 1997
On an ordinary spring day, during an ordinary picnic, the calm, organised, ordinary life of science writer Joe Rose is blown apart due to the repercussions of a tragic accident. Joe sees a hot-air balloon with a young boy trapped in its basket, out of control and being tossed around by strong winds. In the attempt to save the boy, a man is killed. A stranger named Jed Parry joins Joe in helping to bring the balloon down safely. But unknown to Joe, something passes between Parry and himself on that day - something that spawns a dangerous obsession in Parry, an obsession powerful enough to test the limits of Joe's rationalism, threaten his relationship with his girlfriend and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.
Life can change in an instant...
A film version of "Enduring Love" was released in 2004, starring Daniel Craig, Samantha Morton, Rhys Ifans and Bill Nighy.
"Enduring Love" - Table of Contents
- Ian McEwan Reads The First Chapter Of Enduring Love
- Plot Summary Of Enduring Love
- Wikipedia Plot Summary Of Enduring Love
- Excerpt From Enduring Love
- Reviews Of Enduring Love
- Ian McEwan Answers Questions About Enduring Love
- "De Clerambault's Syndrome"
- Study Resources For Enduring Love
- Guides To Enduring Love (UK Customers)
- Guides To Enduring Love (USA Customers)
- Buy Enduring Love Novel On Amazon (UK Customers)
- Buy Enduring Love Novel On Amazon (USA Customers)
- Buy Enduring Love Audio Book
- Enduring Love Film On Wikipedia
- Enduring Love - Film (UK Customers)
- Enduring Love - Film (USA Customers)
- Enduring Love YouTube vids
- More About The Author Of "Enduring Love" - Ian McEwan
- Ian McEwan On Wikipedia
- Ian McEwan on eBay
- Enduring Love Feedback
- Other Novels By Ian McEwan
- Other Novels By Ian McEwan
- Short Stories By Ian McEwan
- Word of the Day
Ian McEwan Reads The First Chapter Of Enduring Love
- Bold Type: Reading by Ian McEwan
- Ian McEwan reads the first chapter of Enduring Love. This streaming audio clips can be played with the RealPlayer or RealAudio player, available free from Progressive Networks.
Plot Summary Of Enduring Love
Synopsis of Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
Much hyped at the time of release, it doesn't disappoint over a decade later...
Enduring Love has one of the most compelling first chapters of any book ever written. The narrator is Joe Rose, a successful science writer in his 40's. He has enjoyed a happy relationship with his common-law wife Clarissa for many years.
On the way home from picking Clarissa up from the airport, the couple stop for a picnic in the Oxfordshire countryside and as Joe starts to open a bottle of wine, his contented and secure life changes forever...
Hearing a cry, Joe and Clarissa witness a hot-air balloon clearly out of control. The basket of the balloon contains a terrified child and a frantic adult is desperately trying to help. Joe and several other witnesses try to help, but their efforts end in tragedy.
The aftermath of the events of that day affects all those involved, but decidedly unexpected reprecussions occur for Joe, Clarissa and Jed Parry, one of the bystanders who attempted to anchor the balloon.
Joe and Parry exchanged no more than a glance during the rescue attempt, but for Parry, that glance changed his life and turned Joe and Clarissa's world upside down...
The novel explores the theme of relationships (physical, emotional and spiritual) and the issue of trust. Echoing his earlier novel "Black Dogs", McEwan puts his characters into a situation where they are forced to question their values, beliefs and everything they hold dear and familiar in life.
Joe is the main character and outwardly the "victim", but McEwan introduces more than a tiny element of doubt about Joe's version of reality in the mind of the reader and does so in a compelling and very readable fashion...this is definitely a "can't put it down until I find out what happens" kind of book.
Highly recommended.
Wikipedia Plot Summary Of Enduring Love
- Enduring Love - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Enduring Love From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Excerpt From Enduring Love
Extract from "Enduring Love" by Ian McEwan
- Bold Type: Excerpt by Ian McEwan
- Halfway through the novel, a delusional Jed Parry writes the following letter to the subject of his obsession, Joe Rose...
Reviews Of Enduring Love
Book reviews of "Enduring Love" by Ian McEwan
- Review of Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
- The Bookbag - Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
- British Council "Book of the Month"
- British Council "Book of the Month" - review of Enduring Love
Ian McEwan Answers Questions About Enduring Love
Ian McEwan interviews on the subject of Enduring Love
- Random House - Readers' Group - Hot Spot
- Ian McEwan responds to questions about Enduring Love
- Bold Type: Interview with Ian McEwan
- bold type website's interview with Ian McEwan about enduring Love
"De Clerambault's Syndrome"
How Ian McEwan managed to fool the psychiatric world...
- Salon Books | Ian McEwan fools British shrinks
- The novelist puts one over on a few American critics, too.
Study Resources For Enduring Love
- Ian McEwan Website: Enduring Love Study Resources
- Website devoted to the British author Ian McEwan
- Teachit's English teaching resources
- Enduring Love questions and essays
- ReadingGroupGuides.com - Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
- Enduring Love discussion questions
Guides To Enduring Love (UK Customers)
A-level Notes for Ian McEwans "Enduring Love"
(Jane Gibson's 'A'-level Notes)
Ian McEwan's "Enduring Love"
(Routledge Guides to Literature)
Ian McEwan's "Enduring Love": A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries (Paperback)
Ian McEwan: The Essential Guide: "Child in Time", "Enduring Love", "Atonement" (Vintage Living Texts) (Paperback)
Guides To Enduring Love (USA Customers)
Ian McEwan's Enduring Love: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries)
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Ian Mcewan's Enduring Love (Routledge Guides to Literature)
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Achieving "at-one-ment: Storytelling And The Concept Of The Self In Ian Mcewan's The Child In Time, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, And Atonement (Anglo-Amerikanische Studien, Bd. 26,)
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Buy Enduring Love Novel On Amazon (UK Customers)
"Enduring Love is one of Ian McEwan's finest works. It is
also one of the most beautifully written and emotionally
engaging books to have come out of Britain in the past
decade. Fans of McEwan familiar with his superb wartime
novel, Atonement, will enjoy Enduring Love very much.
The novel focuses on love and obsession and the factors
that drive us and how we perceive ourselves through the prism
of our relationships in the modern world.
The story also renders a nuanced expose of the stalking
phenomenon and is constructed in such a way as to encourage
the reader to ponder whether the central character Joe
is imagining the stalking he seems to be undergoing.
An informed and well written dissection of this modern
phenomenon complete with the usual McEwan themes of love, loss
and beautiful prose.
I enjoyed this novel and found it an excellent companion piece
to Atonement. I must admit I prefer McEwan in this form
than to his enjoyable but farcical Booker-prize winning romp, Amsterdam. I would also encourage fans of the recent film starring Daniel Craig and Samantha Morton to read the novel as it differs in some regards from the film, which is also excellent, though the medium lacks the same narrative scope."
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Enduring Love: A Novel
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"Joe Rose has planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after six weeks in the States. To complete the picture, there's even a "helium balloon drifting dreamily across the wooded valley." But as Joe and Clarissa watch the balloon touch down, their idyll comes to an abrupt end. The pilot catches his leg in the anchor rope, while the only passenger, a boy, is too scared to jump down. As the wind whips into action, Joe and four other men rush to secure the basket. Mother Nature, however, isn't feeling very maternal. "A mighty fist socked the balloon in two rapid blows, one-two, the second more vicious than the first," and at once the rescuers are airborne. Joe manages to drop to the ground, as do most of his companions, but one man is lifted sky-high, only to fall to his death.
In itself, the accident would change the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. (In one of the novel's many ironies, the balloon eventually lands safely, the boy unscathed.) But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that very night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.
Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in defamiliarization. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye."
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Buy Enduring Love Audio Book
Enduring Love narrated by Richard E. Grant
- Enduring Love - Ian McEwan - Audio Book
- On a windy spring day in the Chilterns, the calm, organized life of science writer Joe Rose is shattered when he witnesses...
Enduring Love - Film (UK Customers)
2004 - starring Daniel Craig, Samantha Morton, Rhys Ifans...
"A red hot-air balloon floating gracefully over the green English countryside leads to a shocking death in Enduring Love, an eerie and hypnotic movie based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Two men tried and failed to help, and afterwards Joe (Daniel Craig, Sylvia, The Mother) finds himself being stalked by the hungry-eyed Jed (Rhys Ifans, Vanity Fair, Human Nature). Like a gangly wraith, Jed follows Joe and begs him to recognize the passionate love Jed feels certain was sparked by the balloon accident. Jed's obsession crawls into Joe's head and his life, clawing at his happy relationship with his girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton, Morvern Callar, Minority Report) and derailing Joe into an obsessive spiral of his own. Enduring Love builds the taut delirium of a Hitchcock movie. Ifans, best known for his comic performances, curls his tall frame into a seemingly helpless but creepily aggressive shuffle; the haunted eyes of Craig and Morton make the crumbling of their relationship as suspenseful as Jed's stalking. Director Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Persuasion) uses fresh, jarring images and sinuous visual rhythms to craft a tight thriller with unsettling emotional layers. --Bret Fetzer"
Enduring Love - Film (USA Customers)
Enduring Love (Widescreen Edition)
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"In ENDURING LOVE, a Joe (Craig) and Claire's (Morton) romantic picnic is disrupted after a hot air balloon drifts into a field, appearing to be in trouble. Inside the balloon is a young boy and the pilot whose leg gets tangles in the anchor rope. After three men, including Joe, rush to secure the basket and try to save the two passengers, it seems they cannot rescue the pilot, who eventually falls to his death and the young boy remains unscathed. When Joe and one of the other men, Jed, go to retrieve the body of the fallen man, Jed feels an instant connection with Joe--one that, as the weeks go by, becomes ever more intense."
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Enduring Love YouTube vids
More About The Author Of "Enduring Love" - Ian McEwan
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Ian McEwan - British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, And Screenwriter
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Ian McEwan has been writing fiction since the 1970's and has written many bestsellers and received numerous literary awards and glowing critical acclaim.... It is difficult to sum up McEwan's writing...a few words and phrases spring to mind...bold,...
Ian McEwan On Wikipedia
Ian McEwan, CBE, FRSA, FRSL, (born June 21, 1948) is a Booker Prize-winning English novelist.
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