Enduring Love was a finalist in the Whitbread Book of the Year competition in 1997-1998.
McEwan's work first attracted public attention because it was unsettling and disturbing. He initially appeared as a highly accomplished short-story writer. The stories in First Love, Last Rites have a high quotient of evil, particularly eroticized evil and evil involving children. There is a nasty quality to the contents, made more striking, and to some readers more shocking, because of the unemotional language of the writing. There is a perverted sex murderer telling his own story of violating a young girl and dumping her in the canal. There is a tale of sexual initiation among a commune of children without parents. There is an odd story of a man with a pickled penis in a jar who turns his wife into a Möbius strip. Mixed with the startling and the macabre is a surprising amount of humor. Without question, a new voice had joined the chorus of postwar British fiction.
McEwan was twenty-seven when First Love, Last Rites was published. His apparent precocity along with his willingness to affront conventional decorum aligned him with Amis, another assured young talent, whose debut, The Rachel Papers, had appeared in 1973, when he was only twenty-four years old.
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