"saturday" by ian mcewan

Lyrical and honest. The dust jacket doesn't lie: the last 100 pages refuses to be put down. Some quotes:

"No more big ideas. The world must improve, if at all, by tiny steps. People mostly take an existential view – having to sweep the streets for a living looks like simple bad luck. It’s not a visionary age. The streets need to be clean. Let the unlucky enlist.”
P. 74

"But is there a lifetime’s satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it’s one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a Spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as Daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel. When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping an aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme.”
P. 27

“What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife.”
P. 38

“An so his night ends, and this is where he begins his day, at 6am, wondering whether all the essences of marital compromise have been flung carelessly into one moment: in darkness, in the missionary position, in a hurry, without preamble. But these are the externals. Now he is freed from thought, from memory, from the passing seconds and from the state of the world. Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air. As his mother used to say, another element; the day is changed, Henry, when you take a swim. And that day is bound to be marked out from all the rest.”
P. 50

“This is the grandeur. And a bracing kind of consolation in the brief privilege of consciousness.”
P. 56

“Cities and states beyond repair. The whole world resembling Theo’s bedroom. A race of extraterrestrial grown-ups is needed to set right the general disorder, then put every one to bed for an early night. God once was supposed to be a grown-up, but in disputes He childishly took sides. Then sending us an actual child, one of His own – the last thing we needed. A spinning rock already swarming with orphans…”
P. 122

“They are fighting over armies they will never see, about which they know almost nothing.”
P. 190