Anyone else read it? Worth a thread of its own, I reckon. Mackstress summed it up well on the current reading thread: "I just read On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. It's excruciating, but brilliant. A great, tight little study of how the wrong reactions at the wrong moment can ruin your entire life." It's absolutely, heart-breakingly brilliant. McEwen's getting better and better; I think this was his best so far.

I listened to this on audiobook, and while I enjoyed it for the most part, I don't think it was the type of book that lends itself to audio well--so much narration, close details, passages that I'm sure lasted only a page or two seemed to drag on forever.

Yeah, agreed Inca. I'm a big audiobook fan but I don't reckon this'd work very well in that format. You need the page in front of you to really soak up the wonderful detail that he puts in. Which isn't to say it's dense - it's a pretty light read; it's just that there were lots of passages where I thought 'wow' and immediately went back to re-read them. The last section of the novel, which covers the main bloke's later life is as good as anything I've read this year.