nutshell

Author Name: Ian McEwan

“We were epic lovers. Standing on a height so high that no one before us had ever reached it, neither life nor poetry. Our love was so sublime and grand that we saw it as a universal law. It was a moral code, a must-have way to connect with others, but that the world, for some reason, had overlooked. Whenever we lay face to face on the narrow bed, each looking into the other's eyes, and talked to each other, we brought ourselves out of the void and into the open. She held my hands and kissed them, and for the first time in my life I wasn't ashamed of them. Our families, after we had talked in detail about them, for the first time made sense. We loved our families passionately, despite all the difficulties of the past. The same was true of our dearest and closest friends. It was in our hands to forgive everyone for their sins. Our love had done good in this world. Trudy and I had never listened and spoken so carefully. Our lovemaking begins our conversation, our conversation begins our lovemaking. * Trudy, in the last months of her pregnancy, betrayed her husband, John, the delicate poet who wrote his most beautiful poems about her (Her shoulders are as white as peeled apples), even though she still lived in his house: a crumbling, but priceless, house in the middle of London. The insanely frivolous lover was none other than John's own brother, Claude, who hatched a dangerous plan and a secret future with Trudy to take over the house. But there is a witness, a hidden witness, who has just entered his ninth month in Trudy's womb, who tells us what happened.