The three are refugees from a broken household: Aunt Hermione, Emily Tallis’s younger sister, has run off to Paris with “a man who worked in the wireless.” To this cast of characters add some servants and the anomalous figure of Robbie Turner. He is bringing a wealthy friend, Paul Marshall, and there are three cousins just arrived from the north, the Quinceys-Lola, fifteen, and nine-year-old twins, Jackson and Pierrot-who are to act in Briony’s play. She has just composed a play, “The Trials of Arabella,” to be performed in honor of her brother’s homecoming. The novel’s first half takes place over two summer days in 1935, on a Surrey estate occupied by the Tallis family: Jack, the head of the household, whose work for the Ministry of Defense keeps him night after night in London Emily, his wife, who is prone to migraines and long spells of daydreaming in her bed Leon, the eldest child and only son, twenty-five and working in London in a modest position at a bank, though he has a law degree his sister Cecilia, younger by two years, fresh from her finals at Cambridge, bored and at loose ends and our heroine, thirteen-year-old Briony, given to posing philosophical questions and perusing the thesaurus, and for the past two years an increasingly active writer. Ian McEwan, whose novels have tended to be short, smart, and saturnine, has produced a beautiful and majestic fictional panorama, “Atonement” (Doubleday $26). In his fictional panorama “Atonement,” McEwan captures the tastes and sights of a past he did not witness as a child.

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