Atonement

Ian McEwan's Atonement, published in 2001, opens on a summer day in 1935 at the Tallis family's country estate in England. Thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, who writes stories, lives there with her parents, Jack and Emily, and her older sister Cecilia, who has just come home from Cambridge alongside Robbie Turner, the housekeeper's son and Cecilia's childhood friend. The household is unsettled by the arrival of Briony's cousins, fifteen-year-old Lola and the nine-year-old twins Jackson and Pierrot, whose parents are divorcing, and by the return of Briony's brother Leon from London with his friend Paul Marshall. Reading an encounter between Cecilia and Robbie in a way neither of them intended, Briony tells a story about what she believes she has seen, and that account directs the course of all three lives.

The novel is arranged in three periods: England in 1935, the Second World War in England and France, and the present day. The middle section follows the war years, and the final part returns to Briony in later life as a novelist, where the book she is composing and its relationship to what happened in 1935 become part of the narrative itself. The structure is often described as metafictional, in that the novel turns on the act of writing and on the distance between a version of events and the people those events belong to.

Atonement made the 2001 Booker Prize shortlist and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In 2010 Time magazine included it in a list of the hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923, and it was adapted into a feature film directed by Joe Wright in 2007.