Product Description

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2596 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Atonement is Ian McEwan's ninth novel and his first since the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam in 1998. But whereas Amsterdam was a slim, sleek piece, Atonement is a more sturdy, ambitious work, allowing McEwan more room to play, think and experiment.

We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama The Trials of Arabella to welcome home her elder, idolised brother Leon. But she soon discovers that her cousins, the glamorous Lola and the twin boys Jackson and Pierrot, aren't up to the task, and directorial ambitions are abandoned as more interesting preoccupations come onto the scene. The charlady's son Robbie Turner appears to be forcing Briony's sister Cecilia to strip in the Fountain and sends her obscene letters; Leon has brought home a dim chocolate magnate keen for a war to promote his new "Army Amo" bar; and upstairs Briony's migraine-stricken mother Emily keeps tabs on the house from her bed. Soon, secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present...

The interwar upper-middle-class setting of the book's long, masterfully sustained opening section might recall Virginia Woolf or Henry Green, but as we move forward--eventually to the turn of the 21st century--the novel's central concerns emerge, and McEwan's voice becomes clear, even personal. For at heart, Atonement is about the pleasures, pains and dangers of writing, and perhaps even more, about the challenge of controlling what readers make of your writing. McEwan shouldn't have any doubts about readers of Atonement: this is a thoughtful, provocative and at times moving book that will have readers applauding.--Alan Stewart

Review
Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence', Independent .'Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book- A superb achievement which combines a magnificent display of the powers of the imagination with a probing exploration of them', Sunday Times .'He is this country's unrivalled literary giant...a fascinatingly strange, unique and gripping novel', Independent on Sunday

Independent
‘Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence'

Customer Reviews

It's tempting to call this Ian McEwan's best novel yet
I had to ration myself reading Atonement. At times it seems almost overwhelming: so measured and precise, yet by no means cold or unfeeling. Ian McEwan plays his best narrative tricks in this novel, and wraps this postmodern cleverness in the elevated lyrical intensity of his writing. Having only just finished reading it, it's tempting for this reader automatically to suggest Atonement is McEwan's best book; yet I don't recall before feeling quite the same sense that "This is something very special" all through a reading. As much as I love The Child in Time and Enduring Love, Atonement seems somehow to be pitched on a higher level. I found it profound, and both shocking and moving. Very highly recommended.

Rich, intricate and fascinating story
A warm summer day in 1935: thirteen-year old Briony Tallis has written her first play in honour of her brother Leon returning home, but her niece and nephews are not up to performing it. While she is sulking in her room, she sees her sister Cecilia strip of her clothes and jump into a fountain in front of the cleaning lady's son Robbie. Her ample imagination turns this scene into something it is absolutely not and when at night something awful happens she interprets it completely wrong, an interpretation that will change the lifes of herself, Cecilia and Robbie.

The second and third parts of the book are situated at the beginning of the war: the horrors of the evacuation of the British army at Dunkirk and the life at a London hospital. Finally in the fourth part, set in 1999, it becomes clear that this book is indeed one big atonement.


This is an incredibly rich book and very smoothly written. It begged me to continue reading, even though the setting of the first part (a rich English family in the thirties) is not particularly interesting to me. The second and third parts very vividly describe the horrors of war and the fourth part glues the whole book together and on the other hand also provides an unexpected twist that puts part of the story in a whole new perspective. An absolute must-read.

This one deserves the Booker -utterly brilliant
Having finished ATONEMENT four days ago, I am still digesting and marvelling over it, but want to urge anyone interested in fiction to buy it. Those who have felt short-changed by McEwen in the past should forget the thin, shoddy stuff of Amsterdam and nauseating scenes of murder and sexual perversion in previous novels. This is a masterpiece of the kind you'd never have guessed he'd write. It plays with all the traditions of mistaken adolescent narrators and upper-class country houses, a la Go-Between and Henry James, and surpasses them. I do not think I've read a more beautiful or harrowing description of making love, of anguish or of what novelists can do to real people in any recent novel.
McEwen has always been hugely talented and fascinating, but also frustrating in that his plots were never fully worked-out and his characters lacked passion so failed to involve the reader. None of these flaws are evident in ATONEMENT. I've read everything he's written since he first began, and hoped and waited for something as good as this.