Recommended Reading: The Cement Garden

In The Cement Garden, the father of four children dies. His death is followed by the death of the children's mother. In order to avoid being taken into custody, the children hide their mother's death from the outside world by encasing her corpse in cement in their basement. Two of the siblings, a teenage boy and girl, descend into an incestuous relationship, while the younger son starts to experiment with transvestism.

Little wonder, therefore, that Ian McEwan's first novel caused such a stir when it was published in 1978. Back then, maybe British society was still clinging on to the idea that adolescence was a tidy and simple thing; nowadays, we know that it is anything but - but I would still defy you not to be a little unsettled by the events which unfurl in the pages of this novel. There is also an excellent (but equally unsettling) 1993 movie of the book. Here is a brief extract from the book itself:

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed. My sisters and I talked about him the week after he died, and Sue certainly cried when the ambulance men tucked him up in a bright red blanket and carried him away. He was a frail, irascible, obsessive man with yellowish hands and face. I am only including the little story of his death to explain how my sisters and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our disposal.

In the early summer of my fourteenth year a lorry pulled up outside our house. I was sitting on the front step rereading a comic. The driver and another man came toward me. They were covered in a fine, pale dust which gave their faces a ghostly look. They were both whistling shrilly completely different tunes. I stood up and held the comic out of sight. I wished I had been reading the racing page of my father’s paper or the football results.

“Cement?” one of them said.