"Heartbreaking.... Breathtaking.... Masterly.... No one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." --The Washington Post Book World

"Remarkable, engaging, and gripping.... On Chesil Beach is not only a wonderful read but also perhaps that rarest of things: a perfect novel." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Dazzling.... McEwan treats [his subject] with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any [he's] written." --Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review

"A small, perfect, haunting work of art.... McEwan draws a humane, touching, sometimes comic portrait of marital misunderstanding in an era when so much less was sayable, or said." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Vintage McEwan.... His finely honed prose is a deep pleasure to experience." --Chicago Sun-Times

"Marvelously realized.... Wrenching, funny, smart, and hugely gratifying in unexpected ways.... On Chesil Beach is as merciful to its characters as it is merciless in its heartbreak." --The Boston Globe

"Exquisite.... compressed, crisp, [and] warmly specific.... [A] small masterpiece." --Entertainment Weekly, "A"

"Quietly riveting.... McEwan has never written more beautifully than he does in [this] melancholy and haunting new novel." --O, The Oprah Magazine

"A poignant meditation on love's ebb and flow." --Vogue

"A parable of failed empathy ... mordant [and] melancholy." --The Village Voice

"Completely absorbing.... [I]nfused with a bitter poignancy...intense and powerful ... a masterpiece." --The Philadelphia Inquirer