Though it lacks the confident mastery of his more recent work, this early McEwan novel still has the power to disturb. When the parents of four sexually precocious children die in quick succession - the mother's corpse being entombed in a concrete block in the basement in order to stop the family being splintered by the authorities - the children must learn to cope on their own. In lesser hands this could have been worked up into a straightforward monster-in-the-basement-style thriller, but with McEwan at the helm it more interestingly becomes a study in grief, repression, adolescence, and the dissolution of the family in late twentieth-century Britain.