#140 in Historical fiction
Atonement
- 384
- Pages
- about 7 h
- Reading time
- Film 2007
- On screen
- WH Smith Literary Award
- Exclusive Books Boeke Prize
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
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Our view
“Atonement” follows one child’s mistake across three periods and shows how completely it holds everyone it touched. Its division into parts is its strength, each viewing the damage from a new distance, in peacetime and in war. The book ends as a reflection on what writing can and cannot repair, a turn that rewards readers who like a novel to question itself and may surprise those expecting only a wartime love story.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Atonement is a 2001 British novel written by Ian McEwan. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen once.
- FilmAtonementIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.8 across 607 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 81% of the weight and the score stays at 7.9 — the Historical fiction average of 8.0 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.5 | 49 | 8% |
| Hardcover | 7.8 | 558 | 92% |
Frequently asked
How long is Atonement?
It has 384 pages — shorter than 61% of the ranked books in Historical fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Historical fiction — with scores between 7.8 and 7.9, closest to this book.
