The Cement Garden is my second McEwan and yes, he has done it again. Atonement was my first by him and it had turned out to be a favourite of all time. Next pick will be his booker winning masterpiece, Amsterdam.

McEwan's young narrators have a visceral view of the world surrounding them and Jack is a creation depicting crude vehemence in the head of a teenager. With parents out of the picture, Jack finds a desire to establish himself as the patriarch of the house. His desires are untethered and he often feels urges to dominate over his seventeen year old sister, Julie.

A large part of this short novel is centered around Jack trying to captivate Julie's attention and establish himself a bigger man than anyone Julie goes out with. A house filled with unsupervised teenagers who end up putting their dead mother in a box shouldn't be judged for their absence of conscience as McEwan is clear in his portrayal of the absence of it.

Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom are completely alone in this world and it is not utterly surprising when their needs from each other transcend any socially acceptable role of siblings. Their unnatural dependency has been since they knew of each other's existence and it only became more rotten to its very core with time.

McEwan's prose is addictive and The Cement Garden reminded me of Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening in its unforgettable vulgarity but a strange sense of contentment in reading a piece of fiction that stirred up such emotions whose existence I was blissfully unaware of.