The Cement Garden

Ian McEwan

If Ian McEwan were a chef this would be his signature dish. An early work, it's much thinner than the books that came later but it's just as compelling. I first came across it as a weird late night made-for-TV movie and only later realised the drama was based on an Ian McEwan novel. Closely based, as it turns out. In it a group of four teenage children are left orphaned when both parents die. The father goes suddenly but mother fades away gradually and spends much of the early pages bedridden. Her slow decline teaches the children self-sufficiency but it's an anarchic self-sufficiency which degenerates into incest, cross-dressing and squalor once she has passed away.

For reasons that aren't important except that they add to the post-nuclear atmosphere the dad has cemented the entire garden and the family lives in the last house still standing in a neighbourhood that's been flattened in readiness for a new motorway. And all of this takes place in a roasting English summer. It's Lord of the Flies on steriods. It's good stuff.