Atonement – Ian McEwan

READ FOR BOOKCLUB
Chosen by Suzy

A girl’s half-innocent mistake ruins the lives of those around her, and she spends the rest of her life attempting to atone. The mistake comes in the form of viewing her 9-year-old cousin being assaulted and making presumptions on who the offender is. Her testimony changes the course of everyone’s lives. As a nurse, fixing up soldiers during WWII, she attempts to recant her testimony by putting it on paper in novelistic form.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

⚈ “The thing I love about Ian McEwan is his ability to refashion ordinary things into sensory experiences. Reading his work makes me feel as though I’ve been there, met the folk and lived the complexities of their lives. Atonement is no different. And in fact probably better. Robbie and Cecilia are my friends, I can see the vast Tallis mansion behind my eyes and will remember the scene on Dunkirk for a long time to come. I adore this book.” – Rachel

⚈ “This book still haunts me!  The retreat to Dunkirk was so evocatively written that I felt I could have sat down with a soldier who was there and genuinely related to him and discussed it as a shared experience (yes I *do* realise how ridiculous that sounds). One of my all-time favourites and one of the few novels where I think the movie has done it justice.” – Suzy

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Published 2001
Jonathan Cape
371 pages