BookBrowse Reviews Saturday: 'An exemplary novel, engrossing and sustained...undoubtedly McEwan's best.'

From the book jacket: Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children.

On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne's day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary....he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the Iraq war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug. To Perowne's professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man, who in turn believes the surgeon has humiliated him — with savage consequences that will...