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Journal Entry 1 by livrecache from Hobart, Tasmania Australia on Saturday, August 04, 2007
 From Publishers Weekly
This haunting novel, which just failed to win the Booker in 2001, is at once McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating, and his most sweeping and expansive. It is in effect two, or even three, books in one, all masterfully crafted. The first part ushers us into a domestic crisis that becomes a crime story centered around an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an upper-middle-class country home on a hot English summer's day in 1935. Young Briony Tallis, a hyperimaginative 13-year-old who sees her older sister, Cecilia, mysteriously involved with their neighbor Robbie Turner, a fellow Cambridge student subsidized by the Tallis family, points a finger at Robbie when her young cousin is assaulted in the grounds that night; on her testimony alone, Robbie is jailed. The second part of the book moves forward five years to focus on Robbie, now freed and part of the British Army that was cornered and eventually evacuated by a fleet of small boats at Dunkirk during the early days of WWII. This is an astonishingly imagined fresco that bares the full anguish of what Britain in later years came to see as a kind of victory. In the third part, Briony becomes a nurse amid wonderfully observed scenes of London as the nation mobilizes. No, she doesn't have Robbie as a patient, but she begins to come to terms with what she has done and offers to make amends to him and Cecilia, now together as lovers. In an ironic epilogue that is yet another coup de the tre, McEwan offers Briony as an elderly novelist today, revisiting her past in fact and fancy and contributing a moving windup to the sustained flight of a deeply novelistic imagination. With each book McEwan ranges wider, and his powers have never been more fully in evidence than here. Author tour. (Mar. 19)Forecast: McEwan's work has been building a strong literary readership, and the brilliantly evoked prewar and wartime scenes here should extend that; expect strong results from handselling to the faithful. The cover photo of a stately English home nicely establishes the novel's atmosphere
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Bought for The You Gotta Read This Bag, as it is just so good. I have a copy in my PC.
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Journal Entry 2 by livrecache at By post in Melbourne, a controlled release -- Controlled Releases on Friday, August 24, 2007
Released 4 yrs ago (8/24/2007 UTC) at By post in Melbourne, a controlled release -- Controlled Releases WILD RELEASE NOTES:
RELEASE NOTES:
Part of the You've Gotta Read This book bag
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Journal Entry 4 by freelunch from Cairns, Queensland Australia on Thursday, May 22, 2008
I found the first half of this book frustratingly slow. looking back from the end I believe that may have been the author's intent but at the time it almost caused me to give up (and if I hadn't already given up on four other books this month I might well have)
Fortunately I persevered and it was worth it. This is an excellent book and I want to read more McEwan now!
Thanks again to livrecache for sharing, this copy is off to gypsyrose02 for the bookobsessed.com Make Me Read It relay.
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Atonement: A Novel
