Enduring Love Study Guide

Ian McEwan is one of the most important British writers of the last fifty years. Born in Aldershot, Hampshire, in the south of England, McEwan studied at the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia before publishing a pair of short story collections—First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets—whose chilling content earned him the nickname “Ian Macabre.” Over the next several years, McEwan’s style evolved, an alteration that won the author far greater fame and critical success with the publication of such mainstream novels as Black Dogs, Amsterdam (for which McEwan won the Man Booker Prize), and, most famously, Atonement, which was lauded by Time magazine as the best novel of 2002. McEwan continued to produce at a rapid pace in the years following Atonement, releasing six novels from 2005 until 2016. Among these are Saturday, a response to the War on Terror and Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq; Solar, a satirical examination of the politics of climate change; and Sweet Tooth, a Cold War thriller that features significant autobiographical elements. McEwan is married to Annalena McAfee, a journalist and editor, and lives in London and the Cotswolds.

In 2007, the British forensic psychologist Lorraine Sheridan told the BBC that the 1980s and 1990s saw an increase in stalking-related crimes in England. During those decades, stalkers “had more methods—such as mobile phones and computers—to research their victims.” Whether or not Enduring Love was written as an answer to stalking’s increasing prevalence, it certainly exists in that historical context.

Enduring Love shares a tone and style with other Ian McEwan novels of its period, particularly Black Dogs (1992), Atonement (2001), and Saturday (2005). As a work examining the ramifications of mental illness, it bears comparison to John Wray’s Lowboy (2009), Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (1987), and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). Finally, as a British novel of the late 1990s, it proceeds from the same literary tradition as Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996), Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998), and Michael Frayn’s Headlong (1999).