Atonement

Acknowledgments I am indebted to the staff of the Department of Documents in the Imperial War Museum for allowing me to see unpublished letters, journals and reminiscences of soldiers and nurses serving in 1940. I am also indebted to the following authors and books: Gregory Blaxland, Destination Dunkirk; Walter Lord, The Miracle of Dunkirk; Lucilla Andrews, No Time for Romance. I am grateful to Claire Tomalin, and to Craig Raine and Tim Garton-Ash for their incisive and helpful comments, and above all to my wife, Annalena McAfee, for all her encouragement and formidable close reading.

—IM

A Note About the Author IAN MCEWAN has written two collections of stories, First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets, and eight novels, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Enduring Love and Amsterdam. He has also written several film scripts, including The Imitation Game, The Ploughman’s Lunch, Sour Sweet, The Good Son and The Innocent. He won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR First Love, Last Rites In Between the Sheets The Cement Garden The Comfort of Strangers The Child in Time The Innocent Black Dogs The Daydreamer Enduring Love Amsterdam

The Imitation Game (plays for television)

Or Shall We Die? (libretto for oratorio by Michael Berkeley)

The Ploughman’s Lunch (film script)

Sour Sweet (film script)

PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE an imprint of Doubleday a division of Random House, Inc. 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

DOUBLEDAY is a trademark of Doubleday a division of Random House, Inc.

First published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote from copyrighted material:

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McEwan, Ian. Atonement : a novel / Ian McEwan.—1st ed. in the USA p. cm. 1. Dunkerque (France), Battle of, 1940—Fiction. 2. Country life—Fiction. 3. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 4. England—Fiction. 5. Sisters—Fiction. 6. Guilt—Fiction. I. Title.