Product Description

Film tie-in edition

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2458 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Observer
`Impressive'

Eve Magazine
'One of the great unrequited love stories.'

The Times
"Atonement is a masterpiece...it is also an elegy to a time which, however volatile, still had certainties."

Customer Reviews

Bit long winded
I've never not finished a book once I've started it, but to be honest, I struggled with this one. At the start I didn't warm at all to any of the characters except for Robbie and what followed in the book enamoured me to them even less. But struggle I did and although I found the scenes in the lead up to Dunkirk very hard to read as they were so gruesome, I was glad I persevered. The last 100 pages more than made up for what came before. I'd read "On Chesil Beach" so was expecting the one pivotal moment in life aspect but it was so much more life altering in this book. It did stay with me long afterwards but I think the book could have been shortened a great deal without losing any of it's final impact.

Disappointing and tedious
I brought this as a holiday read purely on the basis of its hype and the fact that someone had clearly thought it worth investing money in to make a film. I was utterly disappointed; it was one of the most dull and overrated books I have ever read. It took until chapter nine for anything to actually occur, other than lethargic prose labouring the point that it was an awfully hot summer. So what? That was just rubbing the salt in. ;-)

The most annoying section of the book is the description of the evacuation from Dunkirk. It felt like McEwan was trying to raise the reader's consciousness by bringing in some gritty realism about the horrors of war, but this has been done so much more convincingly and sensitively by others (i.e. Sebastian Faulks, Pat Barker etc) that it just felt like a bid for the Booker. Call me a whiny old misery but I won't be reading anything else by McEwan again.

Read before watching film!
Atonement is, overall, quite a good read.
However, it is very much an up-hill battle to really get into it, though once you are in, it engrosses you for around 60% of the time, so in this way is good.
There are several parts throughout the book that I personally had to skip, as they were very slow-moving and irrelevant to the story.
If you have seen the film, the book is even more hard work, as it takes so much time to get round to what actually happens in the story, so if you read it after having seen the film - good luck!