Summer Reading.

Martin Amis has said that since America is the most powerful nation in the world, it produces the world's best novelists. Britain once held that distinction, he argues, but has since ceded it to the United States. I don't think Amis gives his countrymen enough credit.

By any measure, Ian McEwan is one of the most accomplished novelists of his generation. Saturday (Nan A. Talese, $26, 289 pp.) is McEwan's follow-up to the critically acclaimed Atonement, one of my favorite novels of the last few years. Saturday takes place on February 15, 2003, the day of the massive protest in London against the war in Iraq. The protagonist is Henry Perowne, a successful London neurosurgeon who has settled into a satisfying, if routine, life. He spends his weekdays in the operating room, his Saturdays on the squash court. This Saturday turns out to be a dramatic one for Henry, though not because of the protest march, which he doesn't take part in. His daughter Sarah, a young but accomplished poet, is due back in town, and Henry is charged with cooking dinner for the occasion. Other events intervene, however, and, in typical McEwan fashion--he is a master at creating narrative momentum and suspense--the last third of the book rushes by as the dramatic events unfold.

As several critics have noted, Saturday owes a significant debt to Mrs. Dalloway, another novel about one day in the life of a Londoner. It is also a surprisingly political novel, featuring several long passages on the war in Iraq. (Henry is a contrarian; he argues with his daughter who opposes the war and with a colleague who supports it.) What I liked most about the book, though, was Henry's relationship with his children. His daughter regards him as a Luddite, so assigns him books to read, which he considers mostly dull and implausible. (About modern fiction he reflects: "He never made it all the way through a single one of those irksome confections.") His son Theo is a blues guitarist, a fact that Henry finds a bit unbelievable. The world of music and poetry is foreign to the coldly rationalistic world of the operating table, and it is touching to see Henry try to understand his children and their chosen professions.

One of my guilty pleasures is historical novels. I am slowly making my way through Patrick O'Brian's series on life in the nineteenth-century British navy, just republished in a handsome hardbound collection by W. W. Norton. Alan Furst is another excellent writer working in this genre. Furst has written eight espionage thrillers, all set between 1933 and 1945. His novels chronicle the ordinary men and women who made up the vast espionage network in Europe and Russia--the people who dropped off packages at discreet locations and met over espresso in French cafes. Though their names have been lost to history, Furst does an admirable job of reconstructing the world in which they lived. Especially good are The Polish Officer (Random House, $12.95, 304 pp.) and Night Soldiers (Random House, $13.95, 480 pp.).

Furst's stories enthrall, but it is his writing that keeps a reader coming back to his work. Few words are wasted; Furst is able to evoke a mood with just a few sentences. (His descriptions of meals and late-night liaisons are particularly good.) A short review in the New Yorker likened reading Furst to watching a black-and-white movie from the 1940s. There's no higher praise as far as I'm concerned.

J. G. Farrell died a young man so he is not as well-known as he should be. (At the age of forty-four, he was washed out to sea while fishing in Bantry Bay in County Cork.) Farrell wrote several novels, but he is best known for his historical trilogy about the British empire. All three--Troubles, the Booker Prize-winning The Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip--have recently been reissued by the New York Review of Books press.

Troubles ($16.95, 459 pp.) takes place in the years 1919 to 1921, during the fight for independence in Ireland. Farrell wisely does not write directly about historical figures, choosing instead to create characters who witness the events from a distance. Troubles tells the story of The Majestic, a run-down hotel on the water in County Wexford. The Majestic was once a grand hotel where the Irish Protestant aristocracy vacationed, but as the fortunes of the country have turned, so have the hotel's. Plaster falls from the ceiling, the sheets are hardly ever changed, and feral cats roam the hallways. The tenants who still come (mostly old women) must fend for themselves, moving from room to room to avoid disaster. All the while, the "Sinn Feiners" are waging a guerrilla war against the local Protestant landowners.

The hotel, of course, serves as a metaphor for the fortunes of Ireland, but the novel is not heavy-handed. As John Banville writes in his introduction, it affords a glimpse of a class of people that has largely vanished: the Anglo-Irish culture of the south that produced, among others, William Butler Yeats. Farrell reportedly got the idea for the novel after visiting an abandoned hotel on Block Island. That made me smile: The Majestic reminded me of the hotel that once graced the shores of the town I visit in New Jersey during the summer. That hotel, once a popular spot for the lace-curtain Irish, still stands, though today it is a retirement home.

Maurice Timothy Reidy is an associate editor at Commonweal.