From the Booker Prize winning author of Amsterdam, a brilliant new novel.On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, son of the Talliss cleaning lady, whose education has been subsidized by Cecilias and Brionys father, and who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By day's end, their lives will be changed irrevocably. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not imagined at its start. And Briony will have witnessed mysteries, seen an unspeakable word, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atoneBrilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of love and war and class and childhood and England, An Atonement is a profound and profoundly moving exploration of shame and forgiveness, of atonement and of the possibility of absolution.From the Hardcover edition.