SATURDAY BY IAN MC EWAN-SUMMARY

The novel entitled “Saturday” acquaints the readers with the main character of the book, Henry
Perowne and his family, throughout the events of a single, but rather a challenging day of his life. The
gifted neurosurgeon finds himself awoken in the middle of the night and loses his appetite for sleep as he
emerges from the bedroom and steps outside on the balcony. He glances over at the sky and notices that
the plane heading for Heathrow Airport caught fire, thus he believes that it was a terrorist attack, as the
British combat troops were part of a coalition against Iraq.
He goes back to bed whilst enjoying the thought of engaging in the same carnal activities with his
wife as if he were in his youth all over again, prior to having children. Rosalind goes to work after she
interrupts their intimate moment and he gets ready for his squash game with Jay, the anesthesiologist. On
his way to the racquet club, as Henry tries to avoid the traffic queue due to the protest taking place in
favor of the US troop withdrawal, he crashes his vehicle into another one, but doesn’t foresee the turn of
events which is about to occur. The driver of the car, known as Baxter, is a criminal, although this
doesn’t scare him as he notices some tremors in his hands associated with Huntington’s disease. He
manages to escape and heads down for the racquet club but doesn’t mention the accident to his wife
when the two speak. Whilst playing, Henry and Jay start to fight over their scores and the game ends with
Jay winning.
Moreover, he visits his demented mother whose memories are easily and successively slipping
away as the days go by, but doesn’t spend too much time with her as he has to get home to prepare dinner
for the guests, as his daughter is in town, alongside his father-in-law and his youngest child, Theo. As he
is cooking, all of his family gets together, despite the two intruders who broke into their home and
threatened everybody as payback for the car crash earlier that day. Baxter enjoys torturing everyone for
his sake, but as the night progresses, Henry cooks up a plan to release his family from this nightmare.
Baxter’s acquaintance threatens his wife, Rosalind and his daughter, Daisy by placing a knife to their
neck after ordering that the girl must remove all of her clothing, demasking her unannounced pregnancy.
Henry tries to get to the criminal’s emotional side by requesting that he and Baxter go upstairs to
discuss whether he’d be a candidate for a clinical trial targeting people with Huntington’s, although this
was just a distraction from what was happening downstairs as there was no clinical trial to talk about.
Theo manages to escape the terror in the living room and joins his father, abetting him to get those two
out of their house. Unfortunately, the only way of doing that was by using force as Baxter fell down the
stairs and injured his brain.
Mr. Perowne was not on-call that night, although he got paged to the emergency room for a consult
followed by a brain surgery on a patient. Little did he know that the patient was Baxter and even if he
didn’t want to help him, he operated on the man who previously tortured his family. After that, Henry
went home and enjoyed the night with his wife.