SYNOPSIS On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip of her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend 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, and will have become victims of the younger girl’s imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone. Atonement by IAN McEWAN STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION Has Briony atoned by the end of the novel? Is this novel an exploration into the endless possibilities of story-telling? What do you think actually happened in Parts Two and hree? Did Robbie and Cecilia survive the war? Assess the boundaries that are crossed in Part One and the consequences played out in the rest of the novel. Discuss the romantic ideals portrayed by Briony in Part One – are they upheld throughout the novel? How successfully does Ian McEwan portray the possibility that a life could hang on one decisive moment? he narrative voice shifts throughout the novel, and several of the same situations are retold from a diferent perspective Discuss the diferent narrative viewpoints. Are you more convinced by one narrator than another? Are there signiicant diferences in their accounts? What is the efect of the story being told from several diferent viewpoints? ‘A beautiful and majestic ictional panorama’ John Updike