Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club. I'm the program's producer Andy Bowers,

and the book we'll be discussing during this meeting is the novel Saturday by acclaimed British author Ian McEwen.

The book club members have gathered at their usual table in a New York cafe, so I turn you over now to our host, Megan O'Rourke.

Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club. I'm Megan O'Rourke, Slate's culture editor, and I host, Megan O'Rourke. Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I'm Megan O'Rourke, Slate's Culture Editor, and I'm here with Katie Roifie, the author of Still

She Haunts Me and other books, and Stephen Metcalf, Slate's Critic at Large, at the Housing

Works used bookstore and cafe in Soho in New York.

Today we're discussing Ian McEwen's Saturday, which just came out in paperback,

and about which both Katie and Steve have written for Slate.

So I'll do a little bit of plot summary before we jump in,

but Saturday is the story mainly of Henry Perron, a neurosurgeon in London,

over the course of a single day, February 15, 2003, which was the day, I believe,

that the first protests of the Iraq War, of Britain and America's involvement in the

Iraq War took place. And Peron is a successful, cozily ensconced guy in his kind of upper

middle class life who is mildly disturbed to maybe

less mildly disturbed by the events going on around him and then also by the kind of threat of

incursion into his own family and we can maybe talk about that a little bit more um he by the end

of the book we were confronted with an episode of kind of grave violence, and it's not exactly the episode of violence that we thought it would be.

The book also starts in a very portentous, literally, way, because Peron, it starts in the very early hours of the morning on Saturday, and Peron has woken up to see a comet, what he thinks is a comet flaming across the sky.

And, of course, it turns out to be a plane that's crashing, and he thinks immediately of terrorism.

And when I first read that, I did find that a very powerful way to open a book,

because it seemed to capture very swiftly and with McEwen's kind of consummate expertise,

...