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On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, 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. "From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
About the author
Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories,
First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include
The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award;
The Cement Garden;
Enduring Love;
Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize;
Atonement;
Saturday;
On Chesil Beach;
Solar;
Sweet Tooth;
The Children Act;
Nutshell; and
Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller.
Atonement,
Enduring Love, The Children Act and
On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.
Summary
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, 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. 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.
