Ian McEwan · 1992 · exile

Ian McEwan's 1992 novel. Jeremy sets out to write his mother-in-law's memoir and keeps being led back to one afternoon in 1946, when June and Bernard were honeymooning in the Languedoc and she met two dogs on a mountain path. She left the Communist Party because of it. He never believed a word.

1. 1
   Wiltshire

   June in a nursing home in 1987, dying and dictating - a mystic who once ran the Communist Party's paperwork, telling her son-in-law that everything in her life turned on a single walk forty years earlier.

2. 2
   Berlin

   November 1989 with Bernard, who has spent his life as a rationalist and a man of the left, watching the Wall come down and being knocked to the ground by neo-Nazis in the crowd - which he refuses to see as meaning anything.

3. 3
   Majdanek

   The camp outside Lublin, where Jeremy and Jenny walk among the huts and the boots in 1981 - the fixed point of the book, and the thing June believes she saw a small version of on a footpath in France.

4. 4
   Saint-Maurice-de-Navacelles

   The stone house on the causse, and the honeymoon walk in 1946 where two dogs left behind by the Gestapo come up the path at her - and Bernard is a quarter mile behind, looking at caterpillars, and misses all of it.