Publisher's summary
National Book Critics Circle, Fiction, 2003
In Atonement, three children lose their innocence, as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935, and their lives are changed forever. Cecilia Tallis is of England's priviledged class; Robbie Turner is the housekeeper's son. In their moment of intimate surrender, they are interrupted by Cecilia's hyperimaginative and scheming 13-year-old sister, Briony. And as chaos consumes the family, Briony commits a crime, the guilt of which she shall carry throughout her life.
Critic reviews
- Book Sense Book of the Year Award Finalist, Adult Fiction, 2003
"A tour de force. Every bit as affecting as it is gripping." (The New York Times)
"Enthralling...With psychological insight and a command of sensual and historical detail, Mr. McEwan creates an absorbing fictional world." (The Wall Street Journal)
"A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama." (The New Yorker)
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Performance
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Claudia Rankine's bold new audiobook recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV - everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive.
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Important Work But Audio Is Missing a Lot
- By David P on 08-30-17
By: Claudia Rankine
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Austerlitz
- By: W. G. Sebald
- Narrated by: Richard Matthews
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripping writers imaginable" ( The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him.
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To each their own
- By Sebastian Romero on 04-23-20
By: W. G. Sebald
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Lessons
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Simon McBurney
- Length: 17 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
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Narrator Simon McBurney gets my 100% rating
- By Peggy M on 09-26-22
By: Ian McEwan
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White Teeth
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Lenny Henry, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ray Panthaki, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.
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4.68 stars....a modern classic
- By ibillinsly@gmail on 06-06-18
By: Zadie Smith
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The Known World
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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A meandering audiobook...
- By Daniel on 09-03-04
By: Edward P. Jones
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Cloud Atlas
- A Novel
- By: David Mitchell
- Narrated by: Scott Brick, Cassandra Campbell, Kim Mai Guest, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite.... Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter....
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thoroughly enjoyed
- By Elizabeth on 01-05-08
By: David Mitchell
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Salvage the Bones
- A Novel
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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A hurricane is building, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's 14 and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.
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Good but I wish I hadn't read it.
- By Jeanie on 01-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
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Machines Like Me
- A Novel
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality.
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Very disappointed.
- By Tom on 05-25-19
By: Ian McEwan