"In a 2010 article for "The Daily Beast", Lucas Wittman listed "The Comfort of Strangers" as one of the best of McEwan's pre-"Atonement" works, writing, "McEwan perfectly captures the thrill of travel when one is divorced from familiar surroundings and the chance of something unusual and out-of-character seems possible.Of course, this being a McEwan fiction, the possibility is a brutal truth about how people find love in extreme ways."