People who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call loyalty and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

It‘s a novella, only of 198 pages in total. Ian McEwan‘s prose is impeccable as his taste for varied themes. This is a rewriting of Hamlet but the Hamlet here is yet unborn. Foetus hears the planning of his father‘s murder by the duo (his mother and his uncle) and decides to avenge his father in a strange manner by strangling himself with umbilical cord.Here the novel differs from the original as the fate of the Hamlet is suspended too.

Youth is invariably self-confident! Starting this colossal classic!