Saturday

Saturday is a novel by Ian McEwan, published in 2005 and set within a single day in Fitzrovia, central London, on 15 February 2003.

Henry Perowne is forty-eight years old and a neurosurgeon, and he has planned a day of small errands and pleasures that will end with a family dinner. London is full of people marching against the imminent invasion of Iraq, and Henry, who has no influence over any of it, spends the day thinking about the demonstration, the arguments behind it and how a comfortable man in a rich country ought to live. His arrangements are interrupted by an encounter with a violent and unstable stranger, which puts him and his family on a collision course with the rest of the day. The tension comes from the ordinary business of a private life carried on in the middle of public turmoil.

McEwan writes a novel of consciousness as much as of plot, and much of its interest lies in watching a professional accustomed to solving problems reason his way through a crisis he cannot control.