Atonement by Ian McEwan audiobook review – secrets and lies

Succession actor Harriet Walter narrates this unsettling portrait of class, memory and the nature of fiction

Ian McEwan’s masterly examination of memory and imagination, nominated for the Booker prize in 2001, opens at a gathering of the Tallis family at their country pile, where the youngest daughter Briony is recruiting her cousins to perform in a play. It is a baking hot summer in 1935 and 13-year-old Briony, who has a thirst for drama, is irked when the others don’t share her enthusiasm for performance.

Then she witnesses a disturbing scene from her bedroom window. Her sister Cecilia and Robbie, son of the Tallis’s charlady, are in heated conversation by the fountain in the garden, after which Cecilia strips to her underwear and submerges herself underwater for several seconds. Later that day, Robbie asks Bryony to pass on a letter to Cecilia in which he confesses his desire for her in explicit terms. Briony reads it and decides Robbie must be a wicked person, leading her to tell a lie that will have catastrophic consequences.

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