They include newspaper editor Vernon Halliday and composer Clive Linley, who are old friends, and British Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony.

Clive and Vernon muse upon Molly's death from an unspecified rapid-onset brain disease that left her helpless and in the clutches of her husband, George Lane, whom they both despise.

Neither man can understand her attraction to Julian Garmony, the right-wing Foreign Secretary who is about to challenge his party's leadership.

After their argument, Clive, who has been commissioned to write a symphony for the forthcoming millennium, takes a retreat to the Lake District which has inspired him before.

Inspired by an article on euthanasia that he sees in his old paper, Vernon decides to lure Clive to Amsterdam and murder him under the grounds he is mentally unwell.

They are under the impression it is a double suicide, caused in part because Clive's symphony was a dud and ends on a heavy plagiarism of "Ode to Joy".

"[8] In The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani called Amsterdam "a dark tour de force, a morality fable, disguised as a psychological thriller.

Vladimir Nabokov, asked whether sometimes his characters didn't break free of his control, replied that they were galley slaves, kept severely under his thumb at all times.

Announcing the award, Douglas Hurd, the former British Foreign Secretary who served as the chairman of the five-judge panel, called McEwan's novel "a sardonic and wise examination of the morals and culture of our time.