EXCERPT:

Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last. Yet, looking
up--into the clouds--I conjure him there: his gray-white hair; his gathered brow; and the zaggy mark;
I saw it when lying with him by candlelight and, also, taking our bliss on the sunny moor among curly-cup gumweed and lamb's ear. I see a zaggy shadow in the rifting clouds.

That mark started like lightning at Ahab's temple and ran not all the
way to his heel (as some thought)
but ended at Ahab's heart.

EXCERPT:

When I was a child, I had a personal conflict over my beliefs. My parents were raised in the Buddhist tradition. But I attended Sunday school every week, where I loved hearing the biblical stories about whales, arks, pillars of salt, ribs, and apples.
I was fascinated by these Old Testament parables, which were my favorite part of Sunday school. It seemed to me that the parables
about great floods, burning bushes, and parting waters were so much more exciting than Buddhist
chanting and meditation.

In fact, these ancient tales of
heroism and tragedy vividly
illustrated deep moral and ethical lessons which have stayed with me
all my life.

EXCERPT:

Michael Beard is a Nobel
prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and half-heartedly
heads a government-backed
initiative tackling global warming.

While he coasts along in his professional life, Michael's personal
life is another matter entirely.

His fifth marriage is crumbling under the weight of his infidelities.

But this time the tables are turned: His wife is having an affair, and Michael realizes he is still in love
with her.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998.

From then till 2008, his latest works have received several awards and in 2008 McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year at the British Book Awards..

EXCERPT:

I knew it would begin with the end, and the end would look like death
to these eyes. I had been warned.

Not these eyes. My eyes. Mine. This was me now. The language I found myself using was odd, but it made sense. Choppy, boxy, blind, and
linear. Impossibly crippled in comparison to many I’d used, yet
still it managed to find fluidity and expression. Sometimes beauty.
My language now. My native tongue.

EXCERPT:

This book is about a breakthrough discovery in hypnosis and self-improvement. In 1997 I discovered an unusual method for inducing hypnosis. As a professional hypnotherapist, I've been teaching, testing, and refining it ever since.

I call the technique Instant Self-Hypnosis.

It involves the reading and writing
of hypnosis scripts as a means of entering a state of hypnosis.