Black Dogs : A Novel
Ian McEwan
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
9780385494328
0-385-49432-7
Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall,Black Dogsis the intimate story of the crumbling of a marriage, as witnessed by an outsider. Jeremy is the son-in-law of Bernard and June Tremaine, whose union and estrangement began almost simultaneously. Seeking to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences Bernard and June cannot reconcile, Jeremy undertakes writing June's memoirs, only to be led back again and again to one terrifying encouner forty years earliera moment that, for June, was as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy's own time. In a finely crafted, compelling examination of evil and grace, Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civiliation's darkest moodsits black dogswith the tensions that both create love and destroy it.