|
Atonement | 
 enlarge | Author: Ian Mcewan
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.01
You Save: £7.98 (100%)
New (44) Used (132) Collectible (1) from £0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  38 reviews
Sales Rank: 679
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 0099507382
EAN: 9780099507383
ASIN: 0099507382
Publication Date: August 9, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 33 more reviews...
 Atonement July 17, 2008
This is one of the best books I have ever read.It really brought home the horrors of war to me & left me thinking about this subject for a long time afterwards.This is something I did not expect from the book especially at the beginning when I felt it a little slow. If anyone is tempted to quit this book after the first few chapters I would strongly advise agaist it. I was very sad to finish it.
 VERY disappointing July 14, 2008
If this book is the best of Ewan's, I really don't want to read the others, cause this one was really boring, and disappointing. I read it till the end because I wanted to know where it would lead...and really: it gets us nowhere at all. And the little girl, destroying the life of 2 people, wasn't a character I liked at all, especially at the end. I really don't see her action as "atonement", but as a mark of her egoticism, which was obvious even at the beginning. Having read the book, I don't want to see the film!
Disappointed July 8, 2008
After reading all the rave reviews, I was expecting something a lot better than this. The characters seem flat, the plot sluggish and the ending no reward for having ploughed through the previous pages.
Stunning July 5, 2008
Beautifully written story of lives ruined because a young girl thought she saw something she didnt, and spent the rest of her life trying to
make amends.I really enjoyed this book, easy to get lost in. Caz
One of McEwan's best June 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have read most of Ian McEwan's work now. I've seen his writing change from a clear yet profound simplicity ('The Cement Garden', 'Cupboard Man', etc), to far more complex, brooding, and sometimes highly self-conscious and over-developed works such as 'Saturday', 'Child in Time'. After the first 100 pages 'Atonement' suddenly sheds its self-conscious stultifying descriptiveness and the story flies, redolent of McEwan's best early work.
As descriptive narrative, the retreat to Dunkirk is on a par with Sebastian Faulks' most powerful and resonant sequences in Birdsong. McEwan's evocation of wartime Britain is real, haunting and bleak.
Personally I do not think Briony Tallis ever finds atonement. We discover at the very end what really happened to Robbie and Cee. Throughout the novel Briony has kept us in suspense with a fiction that sustains the delusion that atonement remains a possibility, when in reality there is no way to reconcile the desperate turn of events resulting from her childish ignorance.
Perhaps it's the story of a thirteen year old girl who insulates herself from the terrible consequences of her actions through clinging to the permanant comfort-blanket of fiction until her dying days. Yes, as T S Eliot says, "human kind cannot bear very much reality."
|
|
|
| |
