Atonement: A Novel

Ian McEwan offers up the fictional fall and demise of a middle-class English family, at the center of which is the unconcealing story of a thirteen-year-old girl's dreadful crime, and the guilt that shadows her entire life. In time and space, the novel is vast, spanning from a manor house in England in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk in 1941; from London's World War II military hospitals to a reunion of the Tallis clan in 1999. Winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. 351p.