Atonement (2001)

A young girl’s imagination runs riot with far-reaching and devastating consequences, in Ian McEwan’s masterpiece of metafiction.On a hot day in the summer of 1934, 13-year-old Briony sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching is Cecilia’s friend from childhood, Robbie Turner. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not imagined at its start. Briony will have committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone."Ian McEwan's remarkable new novel Atonement is a love story, a war story and a story about the destructive powers of the imagination...It is, in short, a tour de force ... The novel, supposedly a narrative constructed by one of the characters, stands as a sophisticated rumination on the hazards of fantasy and the chasm between reality and art ... There is nothing self-conscious or mannered about Mr McEwan's writing. Indeed Atonement emerges as the author's most deeply felt novel yet – a novel that takes the glittering narrative pyrotechnics perfected in his last book, Amsterdam, and employs them in the service of a larger, tragic vision." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesIan McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement is a 2001 British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing. Widely regarded as one of McEwan's best works, it was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction. In 2010, Time magazine named Atonement in its list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1923. "On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, 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."--Jacket A story that begins with three young people in the garden of a country house on the hottest day of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives. A depiction of love and war, class, childhood and England, that explores shame and forgiveness, atonement and the possibility of absolution.