Genre Fiction
![Ian McEwan - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000AQ1USU.jpg)
Atonement: A Novel
National Bestseller
Ian McEwan's symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.
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.
Ian McEwan's symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.
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.
Editorial Reviews
"A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama." -John Updike, The New Yorker
"Flat-out brilliant. . . . Lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense." -San Francisco Chronicle
"A tour de force. . . . Every bit as affecting as it is gripping." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Luminous. . . . Atonement is brilliant and like nothing he's ever written before." -Newsweek
"No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan." -The Washington Post Book World
"Brilliant. . . . McEwan could be the most psychologically astute writer working today, our era's Jane Austen." -Esquire
"A work of astonishing depth and humanity." -The Economist
"His most complete and passionate book to date." -The New York Times Book Review
"In the seriousness of its intentions and the dazzle of its language, Atonement made me starry-eyed all over again on behalf of literature's humanizing possibilities." -Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times
"Resplendent. . . . Graceful. . . . Magisterial. . . . Gloriously realized." -The Boston Sunday Globe
"McEwan is technically at the height of his powers." -The New York Review of Books
"Astonishing . . . [with] one of the most remarkable erotic scenes in modern fiction. . . . [It] is something you will never forget." -Chicago Tribune
"Enthralling. . . . With psychological insight and a command of sensual and historical detail, Mr. McEwan creates an absorbing fictional world." -The Wall Street Journal
"[Atonement] hauls a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the 21st century." -The Guardian
"Astonishing. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Bewitching. . . . A thought-provoking, luxuriant novel." -Minneapolis Star Tribune
"McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive. . . . [Atonement] implants in the memory a living, flaming presence." -James Wood, The New Republic
"[McEwan's] best novel so far. . . . It will break your heart." -The Star (Toronto)
"A masterpiece of moral inquiry. . . . Beautiful and wrenching." -New York
"A first-rate novel on any scale. . . . His most expansive and ambitious book. . . . Few, if any, novelists writing today match McEwan in ingenuity and plotting." -Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Magnificent. . . . McEwan forces his readers to turn the pages with greater dread and anticipation than does perhaps any other ‘literary' writer working in English today." -Claire Messud, The Atlantic Monthly
"The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there's nothing McEwan can't ...
"Flat-out brilliant. . . . Lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense." -San Francisco Chronicle
"A tour de force. . . . Every bit as affecting as it is gripping." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Luminous. . . . Atonement is brilliant and like nothing he's ever written before." -Newsweek
"No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan." -The Washington Post Book World
"Brilliant. . . . McEwan could be the most psychologically astute writer working today, our era's Jane Austen." -Esquire
"A work of astonishing depth and humanity." -The Economist
"His most complete and passionate book to date." -The New York Times Book Review
"In the seriousness of its intentions and the dazzle of its language, Atonement made me starry-eyed all over again on behalf of literature's humanizing possibilities." -Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times
"Resplendent. . . . Graceful. . . . Magisterial. . . . Gloriously realized." -The Boston Sunday Globe
"McEwan is technically at the height of his powers." -The New York Review of Books
"Astonishing . . . [with] one of the most remarkable erotic scenes in modern fiction. . . . [It] is something you will never forget." -Chicago Tribune
"Enthralling. . . . With psychological insight and a command of sensual and historical detail, Mr. McEwan creates an absorbing fictional world." -The Wall Street Journal
"[Atonement] hauls a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the 21st century." -The Guardian
"Astonishing. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Bewitching. . . . A thought-provoking, luxuriant novel." -Minneapolis Star Tribune
"McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive. . . . [Atonement] implants in the memory a living, flaming presence." -James Wood, The New Republic
"[McEwan's] best novel so far. . . . It will break your heart." -The Star (Toronto)
"A masterpiece of moral inquiry. . . . Beautiful and wrenching." -New York
"A first-rate novel on any scale. . . . His most expansive and ambitious book. . . . Few, if any, novelists writing today match McEwan in ingenuity and plotting." -Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Magnificent. . . . McEwan forces his readers to turn the pages with greater dread and anticipation than does perhaps any other ‘literary' writer working in English today." -Claire Messud, The Atlantic Monthly
"The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there's nothing McEwan can't ...
Readers Top Reviews
Kevin J. Sharpeescap
The first half of the book is excruciatingly boring. Just a bunch of sisters mulling around, nothing doing anything, raking over their stinking feelings. Really nothing happens apart from a vase getting slightly damaged, yawn. I persevered and after Robbie leaves things really start to look up. The account of trainee nurses was excellent. It has been one of the most gripping and engrossing books I have ever read. Apart from the first interminable 50%. I read The Innocent and absolutely loved it and so thought I would read another Ian McEwan novel and I was (eventually) not disappointed.
David Beeson
Three nightmares dominate 'Atonement'. The first, set in a country house during the oppressively hot summer of 1935, is the build up to the commission of a terrible crime. The offence is the false accusation made by one of the three main characters, Briony, against another. She knows the accusation is at best doubtful, and probably false, but she persists in it, even under oath, to the point of wrecking the life chances of a man who isn’t just innocent but also did her nothing but good. This is the crime for which atonement must be made. Five years later, we find ourselves plunged, again in sweltering heat, into the middle of the British Army’s catastrophic retreat in front of German armoured troops through Northern France to Dunkirk. This is the most powerful account I have read of the torment felt by individual men, especially a wounded man, struggling to keep up with what was practically a rout – undisciplined, chaotic and painful. It’s a tribute to the research McEwan carried out at the Imperial War Museum in London that he was able to capture the atmosphere of that harrowing time, and further proof of his outstanding qualities as a writer that he could convey them so vividly. And the third nightmare is the one experienced again by Briony, in a first step towards atonement, as she trains to be a nurse at a hospital recognisable as St Thomas’s in London. That culminates in an extraordinary day of frightening and intense work, as she nurses wounded men from the Dunkirk evacuation. McEwan gives us a detailed account of the many hours she works, with men lightly injured, with men suffering terrible but treatable wounds, with men who cannot be saved. Finally, there is a kind of coda in which McEwan deepens the dreamlike feeling of the novel still further. Because he leaves us wondering whether what he has given us is a novel of his own creation, or one written by Briony herself, a character he created. We see her going from a first attempt at writing the story, rejected by a publisher who nonetheless gives her excellent advice on how to improve it, to the final work, the one we’ve just read. And she asks us whether she hasn’t told the story as it deserves to be told. She tells us that she could have changed its details is significant ways but chose not to, and calls on us, the readers, to agree that she was right. This reader is sure she is. My view is that Briony turned an indifferent first draft into an excellent novel. And Ian McEwan did well to make her work, and his own, available to us.
Ilya Korobkov
A smart, well-crafted, shape-shifting novel that makes one wonder if being hardwired to appreciate a narrative and yearn for closure does our brains a disservice. Its first part unfolds in a pre-WWII England and is very slow, with great attention given to detailed and drawn-out descriptions of characters (some of whom we will never meet again). It almost seems like the author, who clearly can write beautiful and terse prose, is toying with us, testing our patience with the deliberate pace of the story. Then the second part switches to the fields of the war-ravaged France and goes into high gear, trading the langour of a romance gone wrong for brutal descriptions of war horrors. Then you begin to understand the author's intent and the novel's brilliance. McEwan hints at the major plot twists well in advance, through subtle hints and gradual changes in the writing style, but when they are finally properly revealed, they still produce a satisfied 'oooh' out of you. The prose and characterization are excellent throughout, but the crowning achievement of the novel is a chilling and accurate description of what goes on in the mind of a child blessed (or cursed?) with early literacy. Highly recommended.
Kindle
I found parts of the book heartbreaking, truly difficult to read. I enjoyed the author's lyrical writing very much. The words often were those I imagine Briony would have used. The book also taught life lessons, the least of which is to not speak about things you don't know or understand.
Nicki BReader in Ups
I received this book in the mail weeks ago. I had watched the movie first, had a range of emotions at the end that entailed shock, sadness, anger, resentment, and eventually acceptance... Thought I would order the book because books can lend so much more detail and backstory that a movie simply cannot. I love reading. I have read many different genres, and have even slugged away through Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series... and I thought Robert Jordan enjoyed his descriptions! But Robert Jordan's world was such that even though many passages and even in one case, an entire book were laborious to get through, I still re-read those books and have every single one of them. I have to say that usually when I get a new book, I finish it within a week, no matter how long it is. If it is really good, I will devour it in a few days. Well, it has been weeks that I have had this book and I haven't yet made it past part one. The part of the book I am currently on is where everyone has just gone out to search for the twins. I enjoy descriptions and feeling as though I am a part of the world the reader is trying to describe, but this novel is TOO wordy. So many adjectives and my eyes glaze over. Especially since I don't feel emotionally invested in really any of the characters because there is too much about everything else! When I read two pages about the sunset, all of it's colors, then in turn all of the colors it is turning the trees, leaves, and the surrounding areas and how if the character had just stood up and contorted their body in just the right way, then they would see these things that have just been described to me in full detail, I have a hard time really getting into the book. When there is so much description about the surroundings that several pages later the plot has not progressed, I start to think of other things I should or could be doing. And this is hard for me to admit, because I love reading. Reading should be an escape to another world where you don't have the voice in the back of your mind telling you about mundane household chores you should be doing! Sadly, though I want to like this book so rich in detail, it has too much detail. I will finish it, as I don't like to leave any book unfinished, but it will likely take quite some time, as I will read other books to take my mind off of the odious task of finishing Atonement. I will not be checking out anything else from this author.
Short Excerpt Teaser
CHAPTER ONE
The play, for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes 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 towards 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 humour. 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 fulfilment. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, burrowing in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, when she 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, towards 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 - towards 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 rain-making spell bought at a funfair...
The play, for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes 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 towards 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 humour. 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 fulfilment. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, burrowing in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, when she 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, towards 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 - towards 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 rain-making spell bought at a funfair...
