Author
Atonement
Ian McEwan's Atonement opens on an oppressively hot day in 1935 at an English country house. Thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, an aspiring writer, misreads an encounter between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, a family friend of humbler origins. The accusation she makes, shaped by a vivid imagination and a limited grasp of adult life, alters three lives for good. The novel follows the consequences through the retreat to Dunkirk and the hospital wards of wartime London, then closes with a late-century coda that changes how the earlier sections should be read. First published in 2001 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it is a leading example of literary fiction and historical fiction. It asks what stories can repair and what they can conceal.