Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children. Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day off. He is as at ease here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before.
On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne's day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary. After an unusual sighting in the early morning sky, he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug. To Perowne's professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man, who in turn believes the surgeon has humiliated him - with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep his family alive.
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[Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet]***
(Vintage, 5 January 2006, first published 2005, 282 pages, paperback, #popsugarreadingchallenge 2019, a book that takes place in a single day, bought from @AmazonUK)
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I thought Saturday was an amazing book and completely not what I expected from reading the blurb. The book takes a while to reach the encounter between Henry and Baxter. However, the prose is so well written I was more than happy to take my time. Despite the subject matter, this isn't the gory novel I was expecting. There's something just delightful about reading something so compelling and well written. I'm ready Tony & Susan at the moment as well, the novel that the movie Nocturnal Animals is based on and I was stricken by the similar plots both deal with. Saturday is a much more subtle book. This book made me realise one of my unspoken fears, attracting the wrong sort of attention from someone dangerous who follows me home. The idea of what Henry and his family endure makes my flesh crawl. Henry is much more tolerant about Baxter's behaviour than I would be in the same circumstances.
