I'm in a quandary. The book is undoubtedly brilliant but it left me feeling vaguely unsatisfied and I can only think that this comes down to two points. The first is that I found myself too conscious of the literary device of writing a book about writing a book, too conscious of just how clever McEwan is to really appreciate the story - which is, after all, why I read the book. The other point which worries me more is that I couldn't really warm to the characters and particularly Briony Tallis. Perhaps this is because McEwan was a man writing as a woman doing what mostly men would have done at the time he was writing about. Somewhere along the line it just didn't work for me.
You might appreciate [[Thief by Maureen Gibbon]].
{{amazontext|amazon=0099429799}}