" the child in time"

Just finished "the child in time" by Ian McEwan.
Unbelievable. Aching sensibilities.
A child is abducted from a couple. The husband goes shopping with his little daughter while the wife stays at home. He turns his head for a moment - she is gone. And has to go home and break the news to his wife.
Hope fades as time goes by, the couple separate from the strain. Lots of other things happen over a period of years.
There is a strained semi-reconciliation at one point - the husband visits the wife in her cottage - they make love - love fails to ignite.
The book ends with the wife urgently calling the husband, asking him to visit her ASAP. He does and finds her pregnant. With his child. Unbeknownst to him.
The child is born to the two of them before the mid-wife can get there.
The emotions of that situation, his arrival to find his wife pregnant, realizing that it is his kid, their talking about their missing daughter, the birth with just the two of them present, it was absolutely intense.
They lie together, the three of them, waiting for the mid-wife. Only when she arrives a while later do they even decide to check to determine the sex of the child. Obviously it didn't matter.
Before the baby is born and after the baby is born, the husband and wife have their most honest conversation about how they are going to deal with the loss of their first daughter. Emotionally. Intellectually.
I give it all away because I know you'll never read the book.
The heartache of a child abducted, never knowing her fate, knowing they will never have her back, the magic of a newborn. I don't know what the hell to call this ending.
Happy? Unhappy?
I liked it because it was real. It made me feel. Feel intense and conflicting emotions.
I was uncomfortable reading the book because I am a parent and cannot imagine losing a child. I imagine even non-parents would react to this story as I have been told that even non-parents experience emotion.
It was so well written. This guy blew me away.
Imagine being able to tackle a story like that and avoid the cliche of the happy ending. Imagine being able to write so sensitively that you do not diminish the story, that you play against what the reader's mind wants to see. That you communicate the complexity of these emotions in a way that forces the reader awake. Imagine having the skill to introduce hope into an unimaginably hopeless situation and allowing the hopeful and the hopeless to exist side by side.
Mind blowing.
Great book. Great writer.
I live for this stuff.