The book club I belong to in Nova Scotia chose two books by noted English authors to discuss this summer.

One was Ian McEwen’s “Amsterdam.” It won the Booker Prize in 1998 and served to bring McEwen into major focus as one of the most talented and inventive novelists of his generation. The other is Anthony Trollope’s “Can You Forgive Her?” (1864); I will discuss it at a later date, given its own Victorian importance.

I have been a fan of McEwen’s since reading “Atonement” (2001) “Saturday” (2005), “On Chesil Beach” (2007) and “Lessons” (2022). Many readers will have dug into his futuristic “What We Can Know” (2026). In a writing career dating back to his first published book in 1975 and including many screenplays for British film and television, he has become a kind of legend of the written word and a master of the dark, the macabre, the well-written, and the clever.

“Amsterdam” is a short novel; initially I found it a quick engaging read, but then spent numerous hours musing over its characters, its dramatic movement, and its elusiveness of meaning. Despite its brevity, it is, for many readers, a powerful and disturbing story in which McEwen demonstrates both his authoritative range of expertise and his ability to dig deeply into the lives of prominent players in London cultural circles.

It begins with two old friends marking time at the funeral of Molly Lane, a woman who at different times had been the live-in lover of each of them. They are both now in late middle age. Clive Linley is London’s most renowned composer and Vernon Halliday is the editor of one of London’s upscale newspapers, “The Judge.” Neither is a particularly likable or admirable character despite their prominence in their respective fields.

Linley lives alone while devoting himself to his self-centred lifestyle, his collection of wines, his musical compositions, and his cultural eminence. “He regarded himself as Vaughn Williams’s heir” and had the........

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