Atonement

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by Ian McEwan

Bantam Doubleday Dell

Due/Published March 2003, 368 pages, paper

ISBN 038572179X

New in paper (S03)

Ian McEwan's syhonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness.

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 motives­together with her precocious literary gifts­brings about a crime that will change all their lives. The story follows that crime's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.