Atonement

Shortlisted: The Booker Prize 2001
Published by Jonathan Cape: 1 January 2001

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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

Ian McEwan, born in Aldershot, England, is a critically acclaimed author and winner of the Booker Prize 1998

More about Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan on writing Atonement

‘I did all the research for both the nursing and Dunkirk up in the dome of the Imperial War Museum, now a library but once a chapel. Boxes are brought to you. You open them up and out spills a rather tea-stained letter written by a young lieutenant to his fiancee. It’s the last delivery of post as the British soldiers are falling back. All hell is breaking loose around him.’

Read the full interview here.

Atonement...is certainly his finest and most complex novel. It represents a new era in McEwan’s work

James Wood, The New Republic, March 25 2002

What the critics said

Tom Shone, The New York Times

‘Here is McEwan, at the helm of what looks suspiciously like the sort of English novel – irises in full bloom, young lovers following suit – that English novelists stopped writing more than 30 years ago. Gradually, though, a familiar disquiet begins to settle over the novel like dust … McEwan seems instinctively to have found a perfect fictional equivalent for the ways and workings of trauma – for its blind spots and sneaky obliquities.’

Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

‘McEwan is under the influence of what can only be called a heat wave…[Atonement] confirms me in the belief that there is no one now writing fiction in the English language who surpasses McEwan, and perhaps no one who equals him.’

Laura Miller, Salon

‘Ian McEwan’s latest novel is a dark, sleek trap of a book. It lures its readers in with the promise of a morality tale set in an English country manor in 1935. There will be a crime, we learn, and so far the novel’s furnishings are at once cozy and exciting…Once we’re caught in his snare, though, McEwan takes us deep into far more menacing territory.’

Claire Messud, The Atlantic

‘We have before us so fine and controlled a stylist that we may imagine we cannot ask for more; surely these are pleasures enough […] Briony is a storyteller: she undertakes to shape and describe the world around her with, significantly, a pretense of objectivity.’

Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine

‘McEwan shows how accidents of history can elevate private shame and error to the world-historical plane […] It isn’t, in fact, until you get to the surprising coda of this ravishingly written book that you begin to see the beauty of McEwan’s design – and the meaning of his title.’

Atonement on screen

Atonement was adapted into an award-winning film, released in 2007 and starring Kiera Knightley and James McAvoy.

The cast of the film also included Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave, and was directed by Joe Wright. Atonement won the Bafta for Best Film and the Golden Globe for Best Drama Motion Picture, both in 2008, among other awards.

Watch Atonement on Netflix here