LJ231 Booker Books: "Atonement," by Ian McKewan

Atonement, by Ian McEwan, is a sweeping, emotionally intricate novel that explores love, guilt, class, and the slippery nature of truth. Set across three eras—an English country estate in 1935, the battlefields and hospitals of World War II, and the late twentieth century—the story begins when thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses fragments of a charged encounter between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s brilliant son. Misreading what she sees with a child’s limited understanding and a budding writer’s imagination, Briony makes an accusation that shatters all three lives.

As the novel moves through the brutality of war and into the quiet reckoning of Briony’s adulthood, McEwan probes the long shadows cast by a single, irrevocable mistake. The book becomes both a love story and a meditation on memory, storytelling, and the human need for redemption. Lyrical, unsettling, and formally inventive, Atonement challenges readers to consider whether true forgiveness is possible—and whether art can ever make amends for the harm people do to one another.

The Booker Book group reads and discusses books that have either received, or been on the short list for, the Booker Prize.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration for the January meeting opens on Thursday, 18 December