Still processing this one, but it's worth trying to put some feels into words. So I'm going to try.

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And now to begin, back to the Summer of 1935 on the estate of the Tallis family.

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”

“A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets...”

“Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends.”

“In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world.”

Briony Tallis is a thirteen year old girl from an upper middle class family based in Surrey. As the youngest of three children, growing up in the Tallis household was not the most exciting with an absent working father, an ailing mother and two elder siblings Leon and Cecilia, both senior to Briony by several years.

From an early age, Briony had developed an intense curiosity and an intrigue for the art of storytelling. Her mind became her world and her perception of life and the way she lived it was still in a cocoon of innocence. However, her ambition and strong desires to write something meaningful and true is where Briony takes her first steps in shaking off her childhood innocence and fantasy - like mind.

The long - awaited window of opportunity for a greater relevance and importance will ultimately become the greatest burden and lifelong regret upon her shoulders.

“Nothing as singular or as important had happened since the day of his birth. She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty in a face which a lifetime's habit had taught her to ignore.”

“How had she not seen it? Everything was explained. The whole day, the weeks before, her childhood. A lifetime. It was clear to her now. Why else take so long to choose a dress, or fight over a vase, or find everything so different, or be unable to leave?”

The story of Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis is one of tragedy.

In a singular moment, between two figures by a fountain, an awakening of an ignorant past would alter the future of the lovers. For all the years that Robbie Turner, a son of an estate attendant, worked, studied and lived alongside Cecilia Tallis, never was there a realisation to be uncovered until that Summer of 1935. And suddenly in that moment, the future for both had never looked more fulfilling and exciting.

It was the witness to this moment by the fountain by an imaginative thirteen year old girl that would commence the downwards spiral of events to lead to an intervention of their aspirations. The next 24 hours on the Tallis estate would redefine them all.

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return”

I find it so difficult to comment on this novel given that the twist in its final pages upends everything we read that transpires amongst the characters.

What I will comment on is the beautiful use of the English language to convey this heartfelt and wrenching story. The main themes of this novel are childhood innocence with the misguided intentions of Briony Tallis, love between Cecilia and Robbie, and redemption for Briony over the course of her lifetime for the events that could never be undone.

“Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.”

Though there is a centrality around Briony and her narrative in this novel, Ian McEwan allows us a glimpse into the minds of all the characters and their protagonist thoughts and reasonings which I enjoyed very much. The story was fulfilling with its description of the characters both pivotal and small, and their different roles woven into the story along its timeline.

“When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.”

This timeline spans from the heinous Summer in Surrey of 1935, to 1940 in Dunkirk and London amongst the folds of World War II, and finally an ending with our dear Briony in London of 1999. There is great movement in the story; though some say the beginning is slow in its development, I found that it was perfect for the setup that would be needed as the leaps were made in the timeline.

Overall, my emotions ran high with this novel. There was an injustice to the characters that made it bittersweet and page turning, even if the English took me a while to get into, it eventually had a flow and a lilt like poetry. I loved everything about this book, so many more characters and events not mentioned here that made this a riveting read, and I couldn't recommend it more!

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”

“How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her.”

“How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.”