SATURDAY, by Ian McEwan

''Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces — brain operations, squash games, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy.''

— The New York Review of Books, May 2005