Love and war and sex and death and scandal and society and country houses and grimy hospitals and English accents and an impeccable literary pedigree: "Atonement" is undoubtedly the full Oscar-season ...

Atonement , by Ian McEwan. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 351 pages, $26. Atonement will make you happy in at least three ways: It offers a love story, a war story and a story about stories, and so hits the ...

“She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so,” writes Ian McEwan in his novel “Atonement.” He is describing 13-year-old Briony Tallis, one of recent literature’s most ...

Joe Wright’s Atonement, from a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan, transforms a misguided adolescent error of judgment with tragic ...

Believe it or not, director Joe Wright wanted Keira Knightley to play Briony Tallis, thinking his “Pride & Prejudice” actress might be perfect as the guilt-stricken central character in “Atonement.” ...

The tipping point in Atonement is only slightly less melodramatic, an unnerving act of false witness–bearing that alters the fate of a snobby rural British family on a hot summer day in 1935 and ...

When it comes to the crimes of unbridled ego and bearing false witness, writers are habitual offenders. At the age of 13, Briony Tallis is a born writer. The intricate English girl at the center of ...

Doubleday, 448 pages, $26.00 ncountering Ian McEwan's prose is rather like meeting an extremely good-looking person. We experience a strange confusion of expectations. Rationally, it seems that this ...