On Chesil Beach

by Ian McEwan

Falling in love was revealing to her just how odd she was, how habitually sealed off in her everyday thoughts.

And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all.