Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread

by Michiko Kakutani

Ian McEwan’s remarkable novel Atonement is a love story, a war story, and a story about the destructive powers of the imagination. It is also a remarkable tour de force—one of those novels that gains in resonance and nuance with every reading. The novel pivots around a terrible lie told by a thirteen-year-old girl named Briony Tallis—one motivated by jealousy, spite, an appetite for melodrama, and a willful naïveté about the workings of the grown-up world. Briony’s false accusations will send her older sister’s lover Robbie away to jail and shatter the family’s staid, upper-middle-class existence. They will expose psychological fault lines running through family members’ lives while making us aware of the festering class tensions that existed in England of the 1930s and the momentous social changes that World War II would usher in.