In the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis misinterprets an encounter between her sister Cecilia and the housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, then falsely accuses Robbie of a crime, sending him to prison and later to war, a lie whose consequences Briony spends the rest of her life trying to atone for as a novelist rewriting the truth.
Books mentioned in Atonement (5)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen: Epigraph — Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson: “as she read her way through Richardson's Clarissa.”
The Waves by Virginia Woolf: “She had read Virginia Woolf's The Waves three times and thought that a great transformation was being worked in human nature itself...”
A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman: “Beyond the compass were his copies of Auden's Poems and Housman's A Shropshire Lad.”
Paradise Lost by John Milton: “it surely proved the case of Paradise Lost in reverse—the heroine became more loathsome as her death-fixated virtue was revealed.”