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Atonement: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Ian McEwan (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 8,866 ratings

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from the acclaimed Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author.

On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.

As it follows that crime’s repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.

Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ian McEwan's Booker Prize-nominated Atonement is his first novel since Amsterdam took home the prize in 1998. But while Amsterdam was a slim, sleek piece, Atonement is a more sturdy, more 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 older, idolized 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 prospects of preoccupation 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 Ammo" chocolate 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, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

This haunting novel, which just failed to win the Booker this year, is at once McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating, and his most sweeping and expansive. It is in effect two, or even three, books in one, all masterfully crafted. The first part ushers us into a domestic crisis that becomes a crime story centered around an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an upper-middle-class country home on a hot English summer's day in 1935. Young Briony Tallis, a hyperimaginative 13-year-old who sees her older sister, Cecilia, mysteriously involved with their neighbor Robbie Turner, a fellow Cambridge student subsidized by the Tallis family, points a finger at Robbie when her young cousin is assaulted in the grounds that night; on her testimony alone, Robbie is jailed. The second part of the book moves forward five years to focus on Robbie, now freed and part of the British Army that was cornered and eventually evacuated by a fleet of small boats at Dunkirk during the early days of WWII. This is an astonishingly imagined fresco that bares the full anguish of what Britain in later years came to see as a kind of victory. In the third part, Briony becomes a nurse amid wonderfully observed scenes of London as the nation mobilizes. No, she doesn't have Robbie as a patient, but she begins to come to terms with what she has done and offers to make amends to him and Cecilia, now together as lovers. In an ironic epilogue that is yet another coup de the tre, McEwan offers Briony as an elderly novelist today, revisiting her past in fact and fancy and contributing a moving windup to the sustained flight of a deeply novelistic imagination. With each book McEwan ranges wider, and his powers have never been more fully in evidence than here. Author tour. (Mar. 19)Forecast: McEwan's work has been building a strong literary readership, and the brilliantly evoked prewar and wartime scenes here should extend that; expect strong results from handselling to the faithful. The cover photo of a stately English home nicely establishes the novel's atmosphere

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Set during the seemingly idyllic summer of 1935 at the country estate of the Tallis family, the first section of this thought-provoking novel ambles through one scorchingly hot day that changes the lives of almost everyone present. The catalyst is overly imaginative 13-year-old Briony, who accuses Robbie, her sister's childhood friend and their housemaid's son, of raping her cousin Lola. The young man is sent to prison and Cecilia, heartbroken, abandons her family and becomes a nursing sister in London. In the second part, McEwan vividly describes another single day, this time Robbie's experiences during the ignominious British retreat to Dunkirk early in World War II. Finally, readers meet Briony again, now a nursing student. She is aware that she might have been wrong that day five years earlier and begins to seek atonement, having clearly ruined two lives. In a story within a story, McEwan brilliantly engages readers in a tour de force of what ifs and might have beens until they begin to wonder what actually happened. The story is compelling, the characters well drawn and engaging, and the outcome is almost always in doubt. The descriptions of the retreat and the subsequent hospitalization of the soldiers are grim and realistic. Readers are spared little, yet the journey is worth the observed pain and distress. Well-read teens will find much to think about in this novel.
Susan H. Woodcock, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The major events of Booker Prize winner McEwan's new novel occur one day in the summer of 1935. Briony Tallis, a precocious 13-year-old with an overactive imagination, witnesses an incident between Cecilia, her older sister, and Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis family's charwoman. Already startled by the sexual overtones of what she has seen, she is completely shocked that evening when she surreptitiously reads a suggestive note Robbie has mistakenly sent Cecilia. It then becomes easy for her to believe that the shadowy figure who assaults her cousin Lola late that night is Robbie. Briony's testimony sends Robbie to prison and, through an early release, into the army on the eve of World War II. Gradually understanding what she has done, Briony seeks atonement first through a career in nursing and then through writing, with the novel itself framed as a literary confession it has taken her a lifetime to write. Moving deftly between styles, this is a compelling exploration of guilt and the struggle for forgiveness. Recommended for most public libraries.
- Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

McEwan, a master of psychologically acute and elegantly gothic tales, won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam (1998) and now weighs in with an even more polished and entrancing novel. It's 1935, and England is experiencing a heat wave, while chaos rules at the Tallis country estate. Mr. Tallis is always at the office; his lovely wife, suffering from migraines, is usually in her darkened bedroom. Their youngest, 13-year-old Briony, a budding writer, keeps busy composing silly romances while waiting for her visiting older siblings and displaced cousins. Brother Leon, a bank clerk, arrives with an unattractive but wealthy friend. Sister Cecilia is home after finishing up at Cambridge, as is the sharp and ambitious Robbie Turner, their cleaning lady's son. The cousins, freckly twin boys and the newly nubile and wholly untrustworthy Lola, are unhappy victims of an impending divorce. All are hoping for a soothing holiday, but things quickly turn bizarrely catastrophic thanks to the highly imaginative but utterly naive and histrionic Briony, who sees something sinister occur between Cecilia and Robbie and wildly overreacts. McEwan's instantly addictive story line is of the bad-to-worse variety as he moves on to the harrowing vicissitudes of World War II. Every lustrously rendered, commanding scene is charged with both despair and diabolical wit, and McEwan's Jamesian prose covers the emotional spectrum from searing eroticism to toxic guilt. In sum, he excels brilliantly at depicting moral dilemmas and stressed minds in action without losing a keen sense of the body's terrible fragility, the touching absurdity of desire, and time's obstinacy. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“A tour de force.... Every bit as affecting as it is gripping.” —The New York Times“Lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense.” —San Francisco Chronicle“A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.” —John Updike, The New Yorker“Luminous.... Atonement is brilliant.” —Newsweek“No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan.” —The Washington Post Book World“McEwan could be the most psychologically astute writer working today, our era’s Jane Austen.” —Esquire

From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

From the Booker Prize winning author of Amsterdam, a brilliant new novel.

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, son of the Tallis?s cleaning lady, whose education has been subsidized by Cecilia?s and Briony?s father, and who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By day's end, their lives will be changed ? irrevocably. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not imagined at its start. And Briony will have witnessed mysteries, seen an unspeakable word, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone?

Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of love and war and class and childhood and England, An Atonement is a profound ? and profoundly moving ? exploration of shame and forgiveness, of atonement and of the possibility of absolution.

From the Back Cover

"McEwan's Atonement…truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past…. The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel. In keeping with Robbie's wartime realization -- and clearly with McEwan's own credo that "without the details there could be no larger picture" -- the author's descriptions here are marked by bitter, relentless, closely researched fact. (When Briony loosens a soldier's head bandage, his brains threaten to fall in her lap; in the midst of an otherwise peaceful moment, Robbie spies a child's leg wedged in a tree.) But superb as those narratives are, they are only a fraction of the novel's achievement…. There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes -- the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression -- into his narrative, and in a magical love scene." -- Brian Bethune, Maclean’s, January 14, 2002

“…Atonement is a deliriously great read, but more than that it is a great book.… There are characters you follow with breathless anxiety; a plot worthy of a top-drawer suspense novelist, complete with jolting reversals; language that unspools seemingly effortlessly, yet leaves a minefield of still-to-be-detonated nouns and verbs…. rife with…unforgettable tableaux….” -- Zsuszi Gartner, The Globe and Mail, October 20, 2001

"What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one's literary standards should be.… a tour de force by one of England's best novelists…. Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel -- and more satisfying…-- than anything McEwan has written….sublimely written narrative…. The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own.… ” -- Noah Richler, National Post, 19 October 2001

“leaves no doubt as to why he is a major force in contemporary literature” -- Joshua Knelman, National Post, 20 October 2001.

"I can’t imagine many readers who won’t find it compelling from beginning to end…. McEwan has dealt with major themes before in his novels, but never at this length and with this narrative richness. With Atonement he has staked a convincing claim to be the finest of all that brilliantly talented crew of British novelists, including Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis and Graham Swift, who rose to prominence in the 1980s." -- Phillip Marchand, Toronto Star, 23 December 2001.

“Atonement has power and stature and is compulsively readable.” -- The Gazette (Montreal)

“It is difficult to imagine how the book might be bettered. Bold in its intentions and flawlessly executed, Atonement is one of the rare novels to strike a balance between “old-fashioned” storytelling and a postmodern exploration of the process of literary creation. Atonement is a tremendous achievement, a rich demonstration of McEwan’s gifts as a storyteller.” -- The Vancouver Sun

“Ian McEwan’s writing is so vivid it can make your eyes ache. But you can’t look less closely or put the book down. Such is McEwan’s growing strength. [A]tonement is exacting and poetic in detail as well as generous with wry, often heart-rending insight. Each character is richly portrayed and fully realized, from their subtlest thoughts and motivations to their period dress and surroundings. Atonement sustains, rewards and surprises right up to its final page.” -- Victoria Times-Colonist

“With a clear prose style and a humming sense of tension throughout, Atonement is both illuminating and entertaining. McEwan believes in love and goodness, but he is far more interested in good’s contrary, whether it is evil or mere psychological weakness. There may be atonement for the past, but there is never redemption.” -- The Edmonton Journal

“Class conflict, war and the responsibilities of the artist are among the themes of Atonement, but it is Ian McEwan’s writing that makes this novel one of his best: lush and langorous in the long first section, understated and precise in the latter two.” -- The Ottawa Citizen

"The engrossing new novel by the winner of the 1998 Booker Prize hauls a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the 21st century.” -- Geoff Dyer, The Guardian

“It is rare for a critic to feel justified in using the word “masterpiece,” but Ian McEwan’s new book really deserves to be called one...Atonement is a work of astonishing depth and humanity... This novel really is worthy of the Booker.” -- The Economist

“The narrative, as always with McEwan, smoulders with slow-burning menace. . .the book is magically readable and never has McEwan shown himself to be more in sympathy with the vulnerability of the human heart.” -- The Sunday Times

“McEwan is a consistently entertaining storyteller, giving good weight right up until the final page. Even by his exacting standards his latest novel is extraordinary. His trademark sentences of sustained eloquence and delicacy, which have sometimes over-rationalized the evocation of emotion, strike a deeper resonance in Atonement.” -- The Times

“…no contemporary of his has shown such passionate dedication to the art of the novel.” -- Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

About the Author

Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of more than ten books, including Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize. He lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One

The play--for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper--was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant north. There would be time for only one day of rehearsal before her brother arrived. At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous dash toward a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humor. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished doctor--in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on "a windy sunlit day in spring."

Mrs. Tallis read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella in her bedroom, at her dressing table, with the author's arm around her shoulder the whole while. Briony studied her mother's face for every trace of shifting emotion, and Emily Tallis obliged with looks of alarm, snickers of glee and, at the end, grateful smiles and wise, affirming nods. She took her daughter in her arms, onto her lap--ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from its infancy, and still not gone from her, not quite yet--and said that the play was "stupendous," and agreed instantly, murmuring into the tight whorl of the girl's ear, that this word could be quoted on the poster which was to be on an easel in the entrance hall by the ticket booth.

Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project's highest point of fulfillment. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, when she burrowed in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, and made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon. In one, his big, good-natured face buckled in grief as Arabella sank in loneliness and despair. In another, there he was, cocktail in hand at some fashionable city watering hole, overheard boasting to a group of friends: Yes, my younger sister, Briony Tallis the writer, you must surely have heard of her. In a third, he punched the air in exultation as the final curtain fell, although there was no curtain, there was no possibility of a curtain. Her play was not for her cousins, it was for her brother, to celebrate his return, provoke his admiration and guide him away from his careless succession of girlfriends, toward the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony's services as a bridesmaid.

She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sister's room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony's was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way--toward their owner--as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact, Briony's was the only tidy upstairs room in the house. Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table--cowboys, deep-sea divers, humanoid mice--suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen's army awaiting orders.

A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool's gold, a rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel's skull as light as a leaf.

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.

At the age of eleven she wrote her first story--a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folktales and lacking, she realized later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader's respect. But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.

Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were "esoteric," a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in "shameless auto-exculpation," the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a "cursory" journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the "hieroglyph" of his displeasure. Briony was encouraged to read her stories aloud in the library and it surprised her parents and older sister to hear their quiet girl perform so boldly, making big gestures with her free arm, arching her eyebrows as she did the voices, and looking up from the page for seconds at a time as she read in order to gaze into one face after the other, unapologetically demanding her family's total attention as she cast her narrative spell.

Even without their attention and praise and obvious pleasure, Briony could not have been held back from her writing. In any case, she was discovering, as had many writers before her, that not all recognition is helpful. Cecilia's enthusiasm, for example, seemed a little overstated, tainted with condescension perhaps, and intrusive too; her big sister wanted each bound story catalogued and placed on the library shelves, between Rabindranath Tagore and Quintus Tertullian. If this was supposed to be a joke, Briony ignored it. She was on course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturization. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word--a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so. A crisis in a heroine's life could be made to coincide with hailstones, gales and thunder, whereas nuptials were generally blessed with good light and soft breezes. A love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of housekeeping, the former being set aside exclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until the final page.

The play she had written for Leon's homecoming was her first excursion into drama, and she had found the transition quite effortless. It was a relief not to be writing out the she saids, or describing the weather or the onset of spring or her heroine's face--beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, had infinite variation. A universe reduced to what was said in it was tidiness indeed, almost to the point of nullity, and to compensate, every utterance was delivered at the extremity of some feeling or other, in the service of which the exclamation mark was indispensable. The Trials of Arabella may have been a melodrama, but its author had yet to hear the ter...

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000QCQ9O8
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; 1st edition (May 20, 2003)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 20, 2003
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3718 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 370 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #56,189 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #96 in Psychological Literary Fiction
- #325 in Historical British & Irish Literature
- #407 in Contemporary Literary Fiction

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Ian McEwan

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Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

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Andrew Ellington

Emotionally draining yet resounding in its importance and significance, completely worth the read...

Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2007

Verified Purchase

Upon reading `Atonement' one is completely removed from their lives, their places of dwelling and time of departure and transplanted to a place where nothing is familiar yet everything is impressionable. Being the first novel I've read by the acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan I was immediately made aware of his immense talent. The tale presented to the reader is one of remarkable effectiveness, one that is truly relatable and believable and in the end of dire importance for its overall moral is one that transcends the boundaries of this prose and cements itself in our very being, in our every interaction and in our constant memory. Separated into four sections `Atonement' is broken down in such a way as to make the true conclusion all the more shocking and heartbreaking.

Part one retells the events on one especially harsh summer day in 1935. I say `especially harsh' mainly because by the days end events take place that harshly affect the lives of everyone involved. 13-yearold Briony Tallis is a smart and imaginative young girl and she becomes the main focus of our attention as we hear of the day's events. As she attempts to orchestrate a theatrical production in honor of her brother Leon's arrival home she is met with a few snags and some ominous distractions that put her initial plans on hold and send her into a newfound direction. As the relationship between her older sister Cecilia and their housekeepers son Robbie begins to take a turn Briony finds herself in the know of a serious misunderstanding that changes the course of everyone's lives. With their three cousins Lola, Jackson and Pierrot visiting as well as Leon's friend Paul Marshall the house is quite full on the evening in question, so when events take a turn for the worse there are so many more eyes to cast their judgment.

Briony is a very interesting character. I found it truly fascinating as her character unveiled itself with each turning page. Her immaturity is emphasized by her incessant need to be the mature one despite her inability to do so. She's lost in her writing, an obsession that causes her to read deeply into matters that aren't her concern and imagine the possibilities no matter how devastating they may become. She also allows the actions of others to affect her too deeply, finding herself reacting irrationally and this leaves her in a position to do much harm. It's hard for the reader not to find themselves calling Briony out as the villain here, for it's her needless actions that cause so much pain, but in reality she's nothing more than a young child who was invested in a poor decision.

So, with an accusation made and a terrible crime committed we brace ourselves for the second and third parts of the novel where we follow Robbie and Briony respectably as they strive to patch up their lives. Robbie has been through hell, literally, and in the second part of the novel we follow his journey as he strives to get home from the war. The horrors he is witness to, the atrocities he is privy to are all sprawled out for us is detail, as is his dire need to be reunited with his lost love Cecilia. The third part covers Briony's struggles as a nurse during the war, but more importantly her struggles within herself for some ounce of atonement for her sins. She has grown up since that summer day, not only in age but in understanding, and she is finally able to grasp the seriousness of her lies. The pain she has caused will never fully be undone, but she desires to do all she can to write them.

The novel opens with such a brilliantly conceived idea, and is so effortlessly and elegantly penned that one is immediately engulfed in its design. I for one could not put it down and read the entire first section in one sitting. Sadly the second a third sections do not read as briskly, but their importance is all the more secured by the closing section as elderly Briony recounts her actions and the ultimate consequences of them all. The final pages are chilling to say the least, and are completely unexpected, so much so that the tears running down my face had all but dried before I realized I was crying.

`Atonement' is a brilliantly orchestrated tale of pain, despair, loyalty, betrayal and the ultimate yearning to make amends, to find atonement for our sins and attain forgiveness for our souls. Truly one of the most inspiring and ultimately absorbing novels I've read to date.

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Christopher Farrell

Brilliant in spots, some overall issues

Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2002

Verified Purchase

The first two parts of Atonement are brilliant.
Part One features an inside look at a somewhat benignly dysfunctional early 20th-Century upper-class British family. There are segments written from the point of view of virtually every family member, and McEwan manages to powerfully convey the lifestyle and attitudes of not just the Tallis family, but of a segment of English society that really resonated for me. With the exception of a couple of minor passages that are a bit overwraught, the writing is wonderfully efficient, with everything having a place and importance, but with an effective pacing that isn't hurried.
Part Two features the experiences of one of the main characters (Robbie) in France, 1940, during the Dunkirk evactuation. This experience is apparently based on the letters from actual participants, and it shows in a real authenticity that makes it hard to believe that the author really *wasn't* there. This section really is better than a lot of non-fiction writing on the war, and like the first section, really manages to capture a time, place, and a real person caught in it.
Part Three is where the novel starts to fray a bit at the edges. We get another wonderful descriptive bit with the main character, Briony, and her experience as a nurse in a wartime hospital. But, it also starts to reveal what I believe is the key weakness of the book, and that's in the characters. All the wonderful setup done in part one (and to a lesser degree part 2) starts to fail to pay off here, as the characters seem to have been cast by their experiences in the first part - their development seems to abrubtly stop there despite just entering the primes of their lives. There is a scene between Briony, Robbie, and Cecilia that feels especially contrived. As it turns out, perhaps this particular scene is *supposed* to feel contrived! But that leads us too...
The last part (only about 15 pages!) is the most intruiging and also, to me, the least successful. Because as it turns out, despite the quality of the writing in the first sections, Atonement is a gimmick book. There are significant signals as to the nature of the novel throughout the first 3 parts, but it's unlikely to be enough to reveal the truth to all but the most attentive of readers. I think most will clearly realize that it's a novel-within-a-novel (and McEwen does some really interesting things here, with the style of the different sections undergoing important changes as the novelist-within-the-novelist matures), but there is more, and it's that "more" that causes some problems in interpreting the book. As it turns out (trying here to be somewhat circumspect), the novel is not *about* Atonement, it *is* Atonement, and is really *about* the writer's craft. The details of this "surprise ending that makes you rethink the entire book" not only really didn't work for me, but actually caused me to devalue the novel as a whole and walk away somewhat unsatisfied. When Atonement was "about" the trauma of growing up as a girl in a repressive English household in a repressive society, or the struggle for survival in a war zone or sanity in a hospital treating the mass of war wounded, it had power for me. When it turned out to "just" be "about" an application of the writer's craft, it lost a great deal of its resonance (and it seemed to needlessly aggrandize the power of the writer, although I suppose this point is open to interpretation - perhaps this just reflects Briony's desparation). Anyway, there was just no emotional payoff on all of the really powerful events many of the characters experience, just a small intellectual one on the nature of writing, and not being a writer myself, all of a sudden the relevance of the book to me seemed to rapidly fade. Regardless of how good the first 300 pages were, it's the last few that leave the lasting impression.
This ending is somewhat unfortunate, because after a slightly slow start, the book is frequently very well-written and really did keep me engrossed through most of it. And the meta-nature of the novel within a novel is a very interesting premise that is well-executed until the very end.
So I do recommend this book for the brilliant work in the first two parts, and part of the third - they really are that good. And the novel-within-a-novel format is well-executed and interesting. It's just a shame that the payoff is an intellectual unravelling of threads and motivations and analysis of writing rather than somthing with real emotional power.

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Fabio Danza Santos Frazao

Livro em inglês

Reviewed in Brazil on November 22, 2022

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O livro é ótimo! Chegou super rápido e em perfeito estado.

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Bob

A Captivating Tale of Love and Consequences

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2023

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"Atonement" by Ian McEwan is nothing short of a literary masterpiece. This novel is a compelling journey through the intricacies of love, guilt, and the profound impact of a single moment's misunderstanding. McEwan's writing is exquisite, his prose is poetic, and he masterfully weaves a story that's both emotionally resonant and intellectually stimulating.

The characters are beautifully crafted, each with their own flaws and desires, making them feel incredibly real. The plot, driven by a tragic incident and its far-reaching consequences, keeps you hooked from beginning to end. McEwan's exploration of human nature, the power of storytelling, and the weight of remorse is thought-provoking and deeply moving.

"Atonement" is a novel that lingers in your thoughts long after you've turned the final page. It's a testament to McEwan's storytelling prowess and a must-read for anyone who appreciates literature at its finest. Highly recommended!

5 people found this helpful

Donatella Moisio

Stupendo

Reviewed in Italy on September 7, 2023

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Letto in italiano ma comprato in inglese per un regalo. Una ottima edizione a un prezzo conveniente. Se comprate libri in lingua sapete che li fanno pagare sempre troppo. Su Amazon ci si può permettere di fare un dono bello senza aprire un mutuo.
Il romanzo è meraviglioso ma è questione di gusti. Io lo consiglio anche in italiano.

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Marina

Muuuy interesante

Reviewed in Mexico on November 5, 2019

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Si pueden leer reviews de conocedores de literatura estaría ideal, a mi me ayudó mucho a disfrutar el libro ver más allá de la historia.

Aquí unas preguntas para hacerse después de acabarlo si quieren seguir el análisis:
Hay dos autores, podemos confiar en ambos? Hay uno que está sesgado? O los dos?
Que es real y que es ficción escrita por el autor/personaje?
Qué cuestiones de privilegio está levantando el autor? El “culpable” es afectado por privilegio?

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Sumit Chawla

Beautiful and subtle writing . Loved it !!

Reviewed in India on November 8, 2017

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A beautiful story. Simply amazing and heart-touching. The writing is so subtle and beautifully written. Loved the use of mataphores throughout the book. Excellent work. A must read book .There is no way one won't be a fan of Ian mecwan's writing after reading atonement. Being a huge fan of Keira Knightley , there was no chance I won't be buying this book. One of the best I have read. Looking forward to some more of Ian's amazingly written novels.

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