Atonement
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Atonement
Buy Now for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Harriet Walter
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By:
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Ian McEwan
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
This new audio edition of Ian McEwan’s beloved modern classic is narrated by Olivier Award winner and Emmy nominee Harriet Walter, who starred as Emily Tallis in the Academy Award-winning film adaptation of Atonement. Her recent credits range from The Crown to Succession and Ted Lasso.
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia plunge naked into the fountain in the garden of their country house.
Watching her too is Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever.
Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
'This new recording of Atonement is exquisitely read by the Succession actor Harriet Walter […] McEwan pulls off a bold narrative trick that causes the listener to question the foundations of his storytelling and the nature of fiction' The Guardian
'The best thing he has ever written' Observer
‘Atonement is a masterpiece’ The Times
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
© 2001 Ian McEwan (P)2024 Penguin Audio
Critic Reviews
Will stay with you for a long, long time
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McEwan builds a story about love, war and regret (so much regret), then undercuts it with a metafictional twist that makes you question every word that came before. Briony’s fictional retelling is a work of astonishing craft and complete moral failure. She can’t undo what she’s done, so she writes a version where she does – the book as a monument to the impossibility of actual atonement. It’s genius and it’s galling.
The trick is how he hides the trick. You’re so caught up in the period detail, the wartime chaos, the unbearable near-misses between Cecilia and Robbie, that you forget you’re in the hands of an unreliable narrator until he tells you outright. When Briony wonders if a novelist can atone while controlling the story like a god, the answer’s obvious. No. You can’t be god and penitent at the same time. That final reveal is brutal not because it’s clever (though it is) but because it underlines the limits of both fiction and forgiveness.
It’s a proper postmodern artefact, wearing its doubts in full view, but still deadly serious about the feelings underneath. It’s also a reminder of how dangerous fantasy and memory are when left unchecked – particularly when filtered through a privileged gaze that never has to live with the full consequences. People like to pretend stories bring truth; “Atonement” shows how easily they bury it.
From a craft point of view, it’s absurdly good. The shifts in perspective are seamless. The pacing is immaculate, moving from slow, almost forensic domestic scenes to the chaos of Dunkirk without a wobble. The prose is sharp enough to cut glass, yet never showy for the sake of it. He drip-feeds information with infuriating precision, the kind that makes you want to throw the book and then immediately pick it back up. Every choice – sentence length, imagery, the rhythm of dialogue – is deliberate, designed to pull you deeper into the illusion while setting you up for the fall.
McEwan’s control is almost clinical. His fascination with moral ambiguity, the fragility of relationships, and the impact of time runs through every chapter. He uses the shifting timelines and multiple viewpoints not as a parlour trick but as a way to show how memory mutates, how the same event refracts differently depending on who’s looking. That temporal play is part of the emotional architecture – without it, the book wouldn’t land half as hard.
I came back to study it, but ended up letting it knock me flat all over again. This isn’t just a novel about atonement, or the impossibility of it – it’s about the act of writing itself, about the arrogance and futility of thinking a story can put right what life has wrecked. If you want to see a book take its own form apart while still punching you in the chest, this is it.
McEwan at his very peak
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Outstanding Narrator
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Heartbreaking
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