Atonement: Summary and book reviews of Atonement by Ian McEwan, plus links to an excerpt from Atonement and a biography of Ian McEwan.

National Book Critics Circle Award, 2002 On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony’s sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge. 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 never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl’s scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life. In each of his novels Ian McEwan has brilliantly drawn his reader into the intimate lives and situations of his characters. But never before has he worked with so large a canvas: In Atonement he takes the reader from a manor house in England in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk in 1941; from the London’s World War II military hospitals to a reunion of the Tallis clan in 1999. Atonement is Ian McEwan’s finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound–and profoundly moving–exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.

BookBrowse

The strength of Atonement is in both the plot and the imagery McEwan conjures up. It is a book to absorb slowly and well worth the time to do so. The middle section, set during the evacuation of the British troops from France (via Dunkirk) in 1940, is particularly good.  

Media Reviews

Library Journal Moving deftly between styles, this is a compelling exploration of guilt and the struggle for forgiveness. Recommended for most public libraries.   Booklist - Donna Seaman 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.   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.   Kirkus Reviews McEwan's latest, both powerful and exquisite, considers the making of a writer, the dangers and rewards of imagination, and the juncture between innocence and awareness, all set against the late afternoon of an England soon to disappear.

Recent Reader Reviews

Rated of 5 by Cloggie Downunder
Mistitled
For me, Ian McEwan’s book, Atonement, was mistitled. I think a better title would have been “How to profit from ruining others’ lives”. I was prepared to give this book a chance. A slow start, but good use of language, beautifully written,...   Read More

Rated of 5 by Chris
I want atonement for the money I spent.
I read this book for my English class and I cannot fathom how it has received nothing but praise. Novels are supposed to SHOW the reader, not TELL the reader, and telling is McEwan's specialty. This is one of the only novels that has actually made...   Read More

Rated of 5 by Marilou Sprang
Atonement
Atonement is a fantastic and addicting novel that is full of surprising twists and turns. It presents the power of the human imagination and what can happen when our imaginations run wild. McEwan’s imaginative story, complicated characters, and...   Read More

Rated of 5 by A Bookshelf Monstrosity
Atonement
I usually make a point of not seeing a movie before I get a chance to read the book, but the opposite is true for my experience with McEwan's Atonement. I rented the movie last summer from Netflix and as soon as the movie ended, I stared at the...   Read More

Rated of 5 by Emily
Atonement Book Review
There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. This line from the final pages of Atonement by Ian McEwan accurately and succinctly describes the story. Atonement is a book that doesn't really seem like it would go together, but it...   Read More

Rated of 5 by Marquie
Atonement avalanche
Prodigious! Supreme masterpiece! If novels came with sound effects then each voluptuous sentence within ATONEMENT would burst with class and vivacity! McEwan wields a glorious prose portraying a bittersweet tale of romance - the atonement of a...   Read More

...11 More Reader Reviews

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