PC World for Computers and Beyond, Mother Care, Marshall Wards, Currys, Laura Ashley, Lloyds Car Insurance, Loose Diamonds, Wedding Bands, Engagement Rings, Natick Executive Office Suites Chapters, Canada . Buy Now Pay Later With Interest Free Credit | Diva Insurance Atonement Author: Ian McEwan Trade Paperback Usually ships in 24 hours Delivery is subject to warehouse availability. Shipping delays may occur if we receive more orders than stock. Our Price: $21.00 Our Sale Price: $14.70 Savings: $6.30 (30%) Ordering is 100% secure . Spend $39 or more at chapters.indigo.ca and your order ships free!. ( Details ) Dimensions: 384 Pages | ISBN: 0676974562 Published: November 2002 | Published by Vintage Canada Our customers who bought this item also bought: Clara Callan (2001) Book ~ Richard B. Wright In the Skin of a Lion (1996) Book ~ Michael Ondaatje House Of Sand And Fog (2000) Book ~ Andre Dubus III chapters.indigo Review Review by Heather Reisman, CEO of Indigo Books & Music Inc. This Booker Prize nominee has it all – family, intrigue, romance and some twists and turns which took my breath away. From the Publisher The novel opens on a sweltering summer day in 1935 at the Tallis family’s mansion in the Surrey countryside. Thirteen-year-old Briony has written a play in honor of the visit of her adored older brother Leon; other guests include her three young cousins -- refugees from their parent’s marital breakup -- Leon’s friend Paul Marshall, the manufacturer of a chocolate bar called “Amo” that soldiers will be able to carry into war, and Robbie Turner, the son of the family charlady whose brilliantly successful college career has been funded by Mr. Tallis. Jack Tallis is absent from the gathering; he spends most of his time in London at the War Ministry and with his mistress. His wife Emily is a semi-invalid, nursing chronic migraine headaches. Their elder daughter Cecilia is also present; she has just graduated from Cambridge and is at home for the summer, restless and yearning for her life to really begin. Rehearsals for Briony’s play aren’t going well; her cousin Lola has stolen the starring role, the twin boys can’t speak the lines properly, and Briony suddenly realizes that her destiny is to be a novelist, not a dramatist. In the midst of the long hot afternoon, Briony happens to be watching from a window when Cecilia strips off her clothes and plunges into the fountain on the lawn as Robbie looks on. Later that evening, Briony thinks she sees Robbie attacking Cecilia in the library, she reads a note meant for Cecilia, her cousin Lola is sexually assaulted, and she makes an accusation that she will repent for the rest of her life. The next two parts of Atonement shift to the spring of 1940 as Hitler’s forces are sweeping across the Low Countries and into France. Robbie Turner, wounded, joins the disastrous British retreat to Dunkirk. Instead of going up to Cambridge to begin her studies, Briony has become a nurse in one of London’s military hospitals. The fourth and final section takes place in 1999, as Briony celebrates her 77th birthday with the completion of a book about the events of 1935 and 1940, a novel called Atonement . In its broad historical framework Atonement is a departure from McEwan’s earlier work, and he loads the story with an emotional intensity and a gripping plot reminiscent of the best nineteenth-century fiction. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is a profoundly moving exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution. About the Author “It caused me a lot of anxiety,” McEwan has said of this, his ninth novel, which he had been waiting years to write. He is a careful writer, with a tendency to worry about how his books will turn out. This one emerged slowly; only after 14 months of ‘doodling’ did he have a paragraph and a half with which to begin the book, now the start of the second chapter: Cecilia standing in the doorway with a bunch of flowers, and Robbie outside. McEwan likes to take a particularly potent, decisive event bringing the protagonists together -- the snatching of a three-year-old girl in The Child In Time , a tragic ballooning incident at the start of Enduring Love -- and let the emotions develop from there. Atonement is his most deeply emotional book to date, and he is pleased that it turned out a moving love story; he has more often been seen as a master of the gruesome, the disturbing and the morbid after his early novels in the 1970’s. His first collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites , was published in 1975 and immediately won him the nickname Ian Macabre. The sense of menace is present from the beginning of his latest novel, and darkness continues through the 1940 sections, but there is a warmth not usually associated with McEwan’s work. “At my age,” he says, “there is an obligation to celebrate the good things in life.” He found his own way towards a love of fiction; there weren’t many books at home when he was growing up. His father was an Army NCO, and the family moved from London at times to North Germany, North Africa, and Singapore, where as a teenager he would find himself engrossed in novels by Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene. Attending a state-run boarding school, he was the first in his family to get a university education; he was also the first applicant to the creative writing course run by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson at the University of East Anglia. Now in his mid-fifties, he has published nine novels and two books of short stories. He lives in Oxford with his two sons. His father, who died in 1996, was a dispatch rider with the Highland Light Infantry and was wounded by shrapnel in both legs during the retreat from Dunkirk; McEwan always knew he would write about it, and he is sorry he wasn’t able to show this novel to his father, who became obsessed with his experiences at Dunkirk in his last years. “He found another man wounded in both arms and together they managed to ride a Harley-Davidson to safety.” The author’s mother, who worked as a cleaning lady, is also present in places in the book; she suffers from vascular dementia, a disease that erases the memory, which afflicts Briony late in life. McEwan feels Briony is the best fictional character he has created yet. Her mistake in telling a lie is the turning point that pulls her from the childhood world of innocence, a theme he has often touched upon. Her shaky claim provides a focus for the class prejudices of her elders, and becomes destructive. “I was haunted by the witch-hunts of the recovered memory syndrome in the Eighties and Nineties. Children were prompted by leading questions from earnest social workers and court officials.” The situation he created allowed him to address this in an oblique way. Atonement is about storytelling, and the dangers of applying fictional form to real life, of imposing order and drama on life’s confusions; as the Financial Times put it, “the power of narrative to create and manipulate truth”. If McEwan likes to play with perspective and describe the same experience from several points of view, this is partly because he feels novels are “about showing the possibility of what it is like to be someone else.” Unlike any other form of art, novels give us the opportunity to get inside someone else’s head and try to understand them. “Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.” Tips for your Reading Group 1. In the novel, many references are made to other works of fiction -- by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen -- hinting at the theme of fictional narrative shaping life. Did any of the references strike you as particularly apt? 2. How did you feel about Briony’s revelation at the end, and what kind of atonement did you feel had been made? 3. “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.” McEwan wrote this as a commentary on the September 11th events in New York City. How does it relate to this novel in particular? 4. The Daily Telegraph said the writing was so sensuous, “You can’t believe a man wrote this.” Do you agree? 5. Why does Briony stick to her story with such unwavering commitment? Does she act entirely in error in a situation she is not old enough to understand, or does she act, in part, on an impulse of malice, revenge, or self-importance? At what point does she develop the empathy to realize what she has done to Cecilia and Robbie? 6. About changing the fates of Robbie and Cecilia in her final version of the book, Briony says, “Who would want to believe that the young lovers never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism”? McEwan’s Atonement has two endings -- one in which the fantasy of love is fulfilled, and one in which that fantasy is stripped away. What is the emotional effect of this double ending? Is Briony right in thinking that “it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindess, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end”? Review Quotes "The engrossing new novel by the winner of the 1998 Booker Prize “hauls a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the 21st century.” –Geoff Dyer, The Guardian “It is rare for a critic to feel justified in using the word “masterpiece,” but Ian McEwan’s new book really deserves to be called one... Atonement is a work of astonishing depth and humanity... This novel really is worthy of the Booker.” –The Economist “The narrative, as always with McEwan, smoulders with slow-burning menaceÉ. the book is magically readable and never has McEwan shown himself to be more in sympathy with the vulnerability of the human heart.” –The Sunday Times “McEwan is a consistently entertaining storyteller, giving good weight right up until the final page. Even by his exacting standards his latest novel is extraordinary. His trademark sentences of sustained eloquence and delicacy, which have sometimes over-rationalized the evocation of emotion, strike a deeper resonance in Atonement .” –The Times From the Trade Paperback edition. Reader Reviews Average Reader Review: Number of Reviews: 1 1. Amazing!! Reviewer: AK from Toronto,Canada (sunnyal8@hotmail.com) Date: 2/10/2003 6:42:41 PM I finished this book in two days because I just couldn't put it down. I loved everything about it and I will definitely read it again. If you want an amazing story that has it all, then read this book! 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