From On Chesil Beach

Author: Ian McEwan
Participants: Edward Mayhew, Florence Ponting
Worst Line(s): "Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He gave out a wail, a complicated series of agonised, rising vowels, the sort of sound she had heard once in a comedy film when a waiter, weaving this way and that, appeared to be about to drop a pile of towering soup plates."

That is one hell of a bad tug job.