Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden, 1978

Over a hot English summer, a family of four recently orphaned children avoid being taken into care by not telling anyone of their bereavement, instead choosing to fend for themselves. Narrated by the morose teenager Jack, The Cement Garden is soaked in an authentic atmosphere of a boring 1970s British adolescence, but their unguided excursions into premature adulthood would probably be treated as farcical and troubling comedy if they were from a less finely-tuned author. The setting seems as familiar and mundane as McEwan could possibly make it (notwithstanding the sibling sexual tension and the problem of how they dispose of certain incriminating evidence), and for a first novel it’s as dry as dust in its cold and disturbing perfection.  PY

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