Atonement

ian mcewan jill tanner

The stunning new novel from the Booker Prize winning novelist. Now reissued as a film tie-in edition. 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. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

Genres fictionhistorical fictionclassicsromancehistoricalbook clubwarliterary fictioncontemporaryliterature

12 pages, Audio CD

First published September 20,2001

Literary awards

booker prize, james tait black memorial prize, whitbread award, wh smith literary award, los angeles times book prize, exclusive books boeke prize, deutscher buchpreis (german book prize), national book critics circle award, commonwealth writers prize, premi llibreter de narrativa, dublin literary award,

Places

england, france, london england, united kingdom,

This edition

Format: 12 pages, Audio CD
Published: January 1, 2005 by Recorded Books
ISBN: 9781419336911
ASIN: 1419336916
Language: English

Characters More characters

Briony Tallis

The younger sister of Leon and Cecilia Tallis, Briony is an aspiring writer, who commits a big mistake with only 13 years- old and spends the rest of hers life trying to fix - it....
Emily Tallis

Emily is the mother of Briony, Cecilia, and Leon. Emily is ill in bed for most of the novel, suffering from severe migraines....
Cecilia Tallis

...
Leon Tallis

The eldest child in the Tallis family, Leon returns home to visit. He brings his friend Paul Marshall along with him on his trip home....
Lola Quincey

A 15-year-old girl who is Briony, Cecilia, and Leons cousin. She comes, along with her twin brothers, to stay with the Tallises after her parents divorce. Lola was supposed to assume the main role in Brionys play, until it was cancelled....
Jackson Quincey

...

About the author

ian mcewan

Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year.

McEwan lives in London.