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Atonement

A Novel

Author Ian McEwan
Look inside
Paperback
$16.95 US
Knopf | Anchor
On sale Feb 25, 2003 | 368 Pages | 978-0-385-72179-0
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  • English > Comparative Literature > 21st Century Film and Literature
  • English > Comparative Literature > Literature of Peace and War
  • English > Comparative Literature > Major Themes: Love
  • English > Comparative Literature > Modern Comparative Literature
  • English > Literature > British Literature – 21st Century
  • English > Literature > British Literature – Novel
  • English > Literature > World Literature Survey – 17th Century to Present
  • About
  • Excerpt
  • Awards
  • Author
Finalist for the Man Booker Prize
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize of Europe and South Asia
An ALA Best "Books for Young Adults"

Ian McEwan’s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.

On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives–together with her precocious literary gifts–brings about a crime that will change all their lives. As it follows that crime’s repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.

“A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

“Flat-out brilliant. . . . Lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A tour de force. . . . Every bit as affecting as it is gripping.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A work of astonishing depth and humanity.” —The Economist

“His most complete and passionate book to date.” —The New York Times Book Review

“In the seriousness of its intentions and the dazzle of its language, Atonement made me starry-eyed all over again on behalf of literature’s humanizing possibilities.” —Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times

“Resplendent. . . . Graceful. . . . Magisterial. . . . Gloriously realized.” —The Boston Sunday Globe

“McEwan is technically at the height of his powers.” —The New York Review of Books

“Astonishing. . . . [with] one of the most remarkable erotic scenes in modern fiction. . . . [It] is something you will never forget.” —Chicago Tribune

“Enthralling. . . . With psychological insight and a command of sensual and historical detail, Mr. McEwan creates an absorbing fictional world.” —The Wall Street Journal

“[Atonement] hauls a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the 21st century.” —The Guardian

“McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive. . . . [Atonement] implants in the memory a living, flaming presence.” —James Wood, The New Republic

“[McEwan’s] best novel so far. . . . It will break your heart.” —The Star (Toronto)

“A masterpiece of moral inquiry. . . . Beautiful and wrenching.” —New York

“Magnificent. . . . McEwan forces his readers to turn the pages with greater dread and anticipation than does perhaps any other ‘literary’ writer working in English today.” —Claire Messud, The Atlantic Monthly

“The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there’s nothing McEwan can’t do.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“A novel of artistry, power and truth that puts it among the most extraordinary works of fiction of the last decade. . . . It is, quite simply, magnificent–a masterpiece.” —Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun

“Magical. . . . A love story, a war story, and a story about stories, and so it hits the heart, the guts and the brain.” —The New York Observer

“Atonement can’t be laid down once it’s been picked up. . . . [McEwan] can write rings around most others writing in English today.” —The Weekly Standard
CHAPTER ONE

The play, for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper, was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant north. There would be time for only one day of rehearsal before her brother arrived. At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous dash towards a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humour. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished doctor — in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on `a windy sunlit day in spring'.

Mrs Tallis read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella in her bedroom, at her dressing table, with the author's arm around her shoulder the whole while. Briony studied her mother's face for every trace of shifting emotion, and Emily Tallis obliged with looks of alarm, snickers of glee and, at the end, grateful smiles and wise, affirming nods. She took her daughter in her arms, onto her lap — ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from its infancy, and still not gone from her, not quite yet — and said that the play was 'stupendous', and agreed instantly, murmuring into the tight whorl of the girl's ear, that this word could be quoted on the poster which was to be on an easel in the entrance hall by the ticket booth.

Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project's highest point of fulfilment. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, burrowing in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, when she made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon. In one, his big, good-natured face buckled in grief as Arabella sank in loneliness and despair. In another, there he was, cocktail in hand at some fashionable city watering hole, overheard boasting to a group of friends: Yes, my younger sister, Briony Tallis the writer, you must surely have heard of her. In a third he punched the air in exultation as the final curtain fell, although there was no curtain, there was no possibility of a curtain. Her play was not for her cousins, it was for her brother, to celebrate his return, provoke his admiration and guide him away from his careless succession of girlfriends, towards the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony's services as a bridesmaid.

She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sister's room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony's was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way — towards their owner — as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact, Briony's was the only tidy upstairs room in the house. Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table — cowboys, deep-sea divers, humanoid mice — suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen's army awaiting orders.

A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool's gold, a rain-making spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel's skull as light as a leaf.

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. 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. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.

At the age of eleven she wrote her first story — a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folk tales and lacking, she realised later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader's respect. But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.

Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric', a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation', the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a 'cursory' journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the 'hieroglyph' of his displeasure. Briony was encouraged to read her stories aloud in the library and it surprised her parents and older sister to hear their quiet girl perform so boldly, making big gestures with her free arm, arching her eyebrows as she did the voices, and looking up from the page for seconds at a time as she read in order to gaze into one face after the other, unapologetically demanding her family's total attention as she cast her narrative spell.

Even without their attention and praise and obvious pleasure, Briony could not have been held back from her writing. In any case, she was discovering, as had many writers before her, that not all recognition is helpful. Cecilia's enthusiasm, for example, seemed a little overstated, tainted with condescension perhaps, and intrusive too; her big sister wanted each bound story catalogued and placed on the library shelves, between Rabindranath Tagore and Quintus Tertullian. If this was supposed to be a joke, Briony ignored it. She was on course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word--a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so. A crisis in a heroine's life could be made to coincide with hailstones, gales and thunder, whereas nuptials were generally blessed with good light and soft breezes. A love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of housekeeping, the former being set aside exclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until the final page.

The play she had written for Leon's homecoming was her first excursion into drama, and she had found the transition quite effortless. It was a relief not to be writing out the she saids, or describing the weather or the onset of spring or her heroine's face — beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, had infinite variation. A universe reduced to what was said in it was tidiness indeed, almost to the point of nullity, and to compensate, every utterance was delivered at the extremity of some feeling or other, in the service of which the exclamation mark was indispensable. The Trials of Arabella may have been a melodrama, but its author had yet to hear the term. The piece was intended to inspire not laughter, but terror, relief and instruction, in that order, and the innocent intensity with which Briony set about the project — the posters, tickets, sales booth — made her particularly vulnerable to failure. She could easily have welcomed Leon with another of her stories, but it was the news that her cousins from the north were coming to stay that had prompted this leap into a new form.

That Lola, who was fifteen, and the nine-year-old twins, Jackson and Pierrot, were refugees from a bitter domestic civil war should have mattered more to Briony. She had heard her mother criticise the impulsive behaviour of her younger sister Hermione, and lament the situation of the three children, and denounce her meek, evasive brother-in-law Cecil who had fled to the safety of All Souls' College, Oxford. Briony had heard her parents and sister analyse the latest twists and outrages, charges and counter charges, and she knew the visit was an open-ended one, and might even extend into term time. She had heard it said that the house could easily absorb three children, and that the Quinceys could stay as long as they liked, provided the parents, if they ever visited simultaneously, kept their quarrels away from the Tallis household. Two rooms near Briony's had been dusted down, new curtains had been hung and furniture carried in from other rooms. Normally, she would have been involved in these preparations, but they happened to coincide with her two-day writing bout and the beginnings of the front-of-house construction. She vaguely knew that divorce was an affliction, but she did not regard it as a proper subject, and gave it no thought. It was a mundane unravelling that could not be reversed, and therefore offered no opportunities to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm of disorder. Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, and dizzy promise of lifelong union. A good wedding was an unacknowledged representation of the as yet unthinkable — sexual bliss. In the aisles of country churches and grand city cathedrals, witnessed by a whole society of approving family and friends, her heroines and heroes reached their innocent climaxes and needed to go no further.

If divorce had presented itself as the dastardly antithesis of all this, it could easily have been cast onto the other pan of the scales, along with betrayal, illness, thieving, assault and mendacity. Instead it showed an unglamorous face of dull complexity and incessant wrangling. Like re-armament and the Abyssinia Question and gardening, it was simply not a subject, and when, after a long Saturday morning wait, Briony heard at last the sound of wheels on the gravel below her bedroom window, and snatched up her pages and ran down the stairs, across the hallway and out into the blinding light of midday, it was not insensitivity so much as a highly focused artistic ambition that caused her to shout to the dazed young visitors huddled together by the trap with their luggage, 'I've got your parts, all written out. First performance tomorrow! Rehearsals start in five minutes!'

Immediately, her mother and sister were there to interpose a blander timetable. The visitors--all three were ginger-haired and freckled — were shown their rooms, their cases were carried up by Hardman's son Danny, there was orange juice in the kitchen, a tour of the house, a swim in the pool and lunch in the south garden, under the shade of the vines. All the while, Emily and Cecilia Tallis maintained a patter that surely robbed the guests of the ease it was supposed to confer. Briony knew that if she had travelled two hundred miles to a strange house, bright questions and jokey asides, and being told in a hundred different ways that she was free to choose, would have oppressed her. It was not generally realised that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone. However, the Quinceys worked hard at pretending to be amused or liberated, and this bode well for The Trials of Arabella: this trio clearly had the knack of being what they were not, even though they barely resembled the characters they were to play. Before lunch Briony slipped away to the empty rehearsal room — the nursery — and walked up and down on the painted floorboards, considering her casting options.

On the face of it, Arabella, whose hair was as dark as Briony's, was unlikely to be descended from freckled parents, or elope with a foreign freckled count, rent a garret room from a freckled innkeeper, lose her heart to a freckled prince and be married by a freckled vicar before a freckled congregation. But all this was to be so. Her cousins' colouring was too vivid — virtually fluorescent!— to be concealed. The best that could be said was that Arabella's lack of freckles was the sign — the hieroglyph, Briony might have written — of her distinction. Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world. There was a further problem with the twins, who could not be told apart by a stranger. Was it right that the wicked count should so completely resemble the handsome prince, or that both should resemble Arabella's father and the vicar? What if Lola were cast as the prince? Jackson and Pierrot seemed typical eager little boys who would probably do as they were told. But would their sister play a man? She had green eyes and sharp bones in her face, and hollow cheeks, and there was something brittle in her reticence that suggested strong will and a temper easily lost. Merely floating the possibility of the role to Lola might provoke a crisis, and could Briony really hold hands with her before the altar, while Jackson intoned from the Book of Common Prayer?
Copyright © 2001 by Ian McEwan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
  • WINNER
    ALA Best Books for Young Adults
  • WINNER
    ALA Best Books for Young Adults
  • WINNER
    ALA Best Books for Young Adults
  • WINNER | 2002
    Commonwealth Writers Prize of Europe and South Asia
  • WINNER | 2002
    Commonwealth Writers Prize of Europe and South Asia
  • WINNER | 2002
    Commonwealth Writers Prize of Europe and South Asia
  • NOMINEE
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
  • NOMINEE
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
  • NOMINEE
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
  • FINALIST | 2001
    Booker Prize
  • FINALIST | 2001
    Booker Prize
  • FINALIST | 2001
    Booker Prize
© © Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
IAN McEWAN is the best-selling author of eighteen books, including the novels Machines Like Me; Nutshell; The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the WH Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both short-listed for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets.

ianmcewan.com View titles by Ian McEwan

About

Finalist for the Man Booker Prize
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize of Europe and South Asia
An ALA Best "Books for Young Adults"

Ian McEwan’s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.

On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives–together with her precocious literary gifts–brings about a crime that will change all their lives. As it follows that crime’s repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.

“A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

“Flat-out brilliant. . . . Lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A tour de force. . . . Every bit as affecting as it is gripping.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A work of astonishing depth and humanity.” —The Economist

“His most complete and passionate book to date.” —The New York Times Book Review

“In the seriousness of its intentions and the dazzle of its language, Atonement made me starry-eyed all over again on behalf of literature’s humanizing possibilities.” —Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times

“Resplendent. . . . Graceful. . . . Magisterial. . . . Gloriously realized.” —The Boston Sunday Globe

“McEwan is technically at the height of his powers.” —The New York Review of Books

“Astonishing. . . . [with] one of the most remarkable erotic scenes in modern fiction. . . . [It] is something you will never forget.” —Chicago Tribune

“Enthralling. . . . With psychological insight and a command of sensual and historical detail, Mr. McEwan creates an absorbing fictional world.” —The Wall Street Journal

“[Atonement] hauls a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the 21st century.” —The Guardian

“McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive. . . . [Atonement] implants in the memory a living, flaming presence.” —James Wood, The New Republic

“[McEwan’s] best novel so far. . . . It will break your heart.” —The Star (Toronto)

“A masterpiece of moral inquiry. . . . Beautiful and wrenching.” —New York

“Magnificent. . . . McEwan forces his readers to turn the pages with greater dread and anticipation than does perhaps any other ‘literary’ writer working in English today.” —Claire Messud, The Atlantic Monthly

“The extraordinary range of Atonement suggests that there’s nothing McEwan can’t do.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“A novel of artistry, power and truth that puts it among the most extraordinary works of fiction of the last decade. . . . It is, quite simply, magnificent–a masterpiece.” —Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun

“Magical. . . . A love story, a war story, and a story about stories, and so it hits the heart, the guts and the brain.” —The New York Observer

“Atonement can’t be laid down once it’s been picked up. . . . [McEwan] can write rings around most others writing in English today.” —The Weekly Standard

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

The play, for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper, was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and wait for the appearance of her cousins from the distant north. There would be time for only one day of rehearsal before her brother arrived. At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed. The reckless passion of the heroine, Arabella, for a wicked foreign count is punished by ill fortune when she contracts cholera during an impetuous dash towards a seaside town with her intended. Deserted by him and nearly everybody else, bed-bound in a garret, she discovers in herself a sense of humour. Fortune presents her a second chance in the form of an impoverished doctor — in fact, a prince in disguise who has elected to work among the needy. Healed by him, Arabella chooses judiciously this time, and is rewarded by reconciliation with her family and a wedding with the medical prince on `a windy sunlit day in spring'.

Mrs Tallis read the seven pages of The Trials of Arabella in her bedroom, at her dressing table, with the author's arm around her shoulder the whole while. Briony studied her mother's face for every trace of shifting emotion, and Emily Tallis obliged with looks of alarm, snickers of glee and, at the end, grateful smiles and wise, affirming nods. She took her daughter in her arms, onto her lap — ah, that hot smooth little body she remembered from its infancy, and still not gone from her, not quite yet — and said that the play was 'stupendous', and agreed instantly, murmuring into the tight whorl of the girl's ear, that this word could be quoted on the poster which was to be on an easel in the entrance hall by the ticket booth.

Briony was hardly to know it then, but this was the project's highest point of fulfilment. Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration. There were moments in the summer dusk after her light was out, burrowing in the delicious gloom of her canopy bed, when she made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies, little playlets in themselves, every one of which featured Leon. In one, his big, good-natured face buckled in grief as Arabella sank in loneliness and despair. In another, there he was, cocktail in hand at some fashionable city watering hole, overheard boasting to a group of friends: Yes, my younger sister, Briony Tallis the writer, you must surely have heard of her. In a third he punched the air in exultation as the final curtain fell, although there was no curtain, there was no possibility of a curtain. Her play was not for her cousins, it was for her brother, to celebrate his return, provoke his admiration and guide him away from his careless succession of girlfriends, towards the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony's services as a bridesmaid.

She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sister's room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony's was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way — towards their owner — as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. In fact, Briony's was the only tidy upstairs room in the house. Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table — cowboys, deep-sea divers, humanoid mice — suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen's army awaiting orders.

A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets: in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool's gold, a rain-making spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel's skull as light as a leaf.

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. 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. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.

At the age of eleven she wrote her first story — a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folk tales and lacking, she realised later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader's respect. But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home.

Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric', a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation', the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a 'cursory' journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the 'hieroglyph' of his displeasure. Briony was encouraged to read her stories aloud in the library and it surprised her parents and older sister to hear their quiet girl perform so boldly, making big gestures with her free arm, arching her eyebrows as she did the voices, and looking up from the page for seconds at a time as she read in order to gaze into one face after the other, unapologetically demanding her family's total attention as she cast her narrative spell.

Even without their attention and praise and obvious pleasure, Briony could not have been held back from her writing. In any case, she was discovering, as had many writers before her, that not all recognition is helpful. Cecilia's enthusiasm, for example, seemed a little overstated, tainted with condescension perhaps, and intrusive too; her big sister wanted each bound story catalogued and placed on the library shelves, between Rabindranath Tagore and Quintus Tertullian. If this was supposed to be a joke, Briony ignored it. She was on course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word--a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so. A crisis in a heroine's life could be made to coincide with hailstones, gales and thunder, whereas nuptials were generally blessed with good light and soft breezes. A love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of housekeeping, the former being set aside exclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until the final page.

The play she had written for Leon's homecoming was her first excursion into drama, and she had found the transition quite effortless. It was a relief not to be writing out the she saids, or describing the weather or the onset of spring or her heroine's face — beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, had infinite variation. A universe reduced to what was said in it was tidiness indeed, almost to the point of nullity, and to compensate, every utterance was delivered at the extremity of some feeling or other, in the service of which the exclamation mark was indispensable. The Trials of Arabella may have been a melodrama, but its author had yet to hear the term. The piece was intended to inspire not laughter, but terror, relief and instruction, in that order, and the innocent intensity with which Briony set about the project — the posters, tickets, sales booth — made her particularly vulnerable to failure. She could easily have welcomed Leon with another of her stories, but it was the news that her cousins from the north were coming to stay that had prompted this leap into a new form.

That Lola, who was fifteen, and the nine-year-old twins, Jackson and Pierrot, were refugees from a bitter domestic civil war should have mattered more to Briony. She had heard her mother criticise the impulsive behaviour of her younger sister Hermione, and lament the situation of the three children, and denounce her meek, evasive brother-in-law Cecil who had fled to the safety of All Souls' College, Oxford. Briony had heard her parents and sister analyse the latest twists and outrages, charges and counter charges, and she knew the visit was an open-ended one, and might even extend into term time. She had heard it said that the house could easily absorb three children, and that the Quinceys could stay as long as they liked, provided the parents, if they ever visited simultaneously, kept their quarrels away from the Tallis household. Two rooms near Briony's had been dusted down, new curtains had been hung and furniture carried in from other rooms. Normally, she would have been involved in these preparations, but they happened to coincide with her two-day writing bout and the beginnings of the front-of-house construction. She vaguely knew that divorce was an affliction, but she did not regard it as a proper subject, and gave it no thought. It was a mundane unravelling that could not be reversed, and therefore offered no opportunities to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm of disorder. Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, and dizzy promise of lifelong union. A good wedding was an unacknowledged representation of the as yet unthinkable — sexual bliss. In the aisles of country churches and grand city cathedrals, witnessed by a whole society of approving family and friends, her heroines and heroes reached their innocent climaxes and needed to go no further.

If divorce had presented itself as the dastardly antithesis of all this, it could easily have been cast onto the other pan of the scales, along with betrayal, illness, thieving, assault and mendacity. Instead it showed an unglamorous face of dull complexity and incessant wrangling. Like re-armament and the Abyssinia Question and gardening, it was simply not a subject, and when, after a long Saturday morning wait, Briony heard at last the sound of wheels on the gravel below her bedroom window, and snatched up her pages and ran down the stairs, across the hallway and out into the blinding light of midday, it was not insensitivity so much as a highly focused artistic ambition that caused her to shout to the dazed young visitors huddled together by the trap with their luggage, 'I've got your parts, all written out. First performance tomorrow! Rehearsals start in five minutes!'

Immediately, her mother and sister were there to interpose a blander timetable. The visitors--all three were ginger-haired and freckled — were shown their rooms, their cases were carried up by Hardman's son Danny, there was orange juice in the kitchen, a tour of the house, a swim in the pool and lunch in the south garden, under the shade of the vines. All the while, Emily and Cecilia Tallis maintained a patter that surely robbed the guests of the ease it was supposed to confer. Briony knew that if she had travelled two hundred miles to a strange house, bright questions and jokey asides, and being told in a hundred different ways that she was free to choose, would have oppressed her. It was not generally realised that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone. However, the Quinceys worked hard at pretending to be amused or liberated, and this bode well for The Trials of Arabella: this trio clearly had the knack of being what they were not, even though they barely resembled the characters they were to play. Before lunch Briony slipped away to the empty rehearsal room — the nursery — and walked up and down on the painted floorboards, considering her casting options.

On the face of it, Arabella, whose hair was as dark as Briony's, was unlikely to be descended from freckled parents, or elope with a foreign freckled count, rent a garret room from a freckled innkeeper, lose her heart to a freckled prince and be married by a freckled vicar before a freckled congregation. But all this was to be so. Her cousins' colouring was too vivid — virtually fluorescent!— to be concealed. The best that could be said was that Arabella's lack of freckles was the sign — the hieroglyph, Briony might have written — of her distinction. Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world. There was a further problem with the twins, who could not be told apart by a stranger. Was it right that the wicked count should so completely resemble the handsome prince, or that both should resemble Arabella's father and the vicar? What if Lola were cast as the prince? Jackson and Pierrot seemed typical eager little boys who would probably do as they were told. But would their sister play a man? She had green eyes and sharp bones in her face, and hollow cheeks, and there was something brittle in her reticence that suggested strong will and a temper easily lost. Merely floating the possibility of the role to Lola might provoke a crisis, and could Briony really hold hands with her before the altar, while Jackson intoned from the Book of Common Prayer?
Copyright © 2001 by Ian McEwan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Awards

  • WINNER
    ALA Best Books for Young Adults
  • WINNER
    ALA Best Books for Young Adults
  • WINNER
    ALA Best Books for Young Adults
  • WINNER | 2002
    Commonwealth Writers Prize of Europe and South Asia
  • WINNER | 2002
    Commonwealth Writers Prize of Europe and South Asia
  • WINNER | 2002
    Commonwealth Writers Prize of Europe and South Asia
  • NOMINEE
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
  • NOMINEE
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
  • NOMINEE
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
  • FINALIST | 2001
    Booker Prize
  • FINALIST | 2001
    Booker Prize
  • FINALIST | 2001
    Booker Prize

Author

© © Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
IAN McEWAN is the best-selling author of eighteen books, including the novels Machines Like Me; Nutshell; The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the WH Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both short-listed for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets.

ianmcewan.com View titles by Ian McEwan

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  • Mr. Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma
    Mr. Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma
    Introduction by Alexander McCall Smith
    R. K. Narayan
    978-1-4000-4477-1
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 07, 2006
  • Snow
    Snow
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-0-375-70686-8
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 19, 2005
  • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
    The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
    Introduction by Tim Parks
    Giorgio Bassani
    978-1-4000-4422-1
    $23.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 19, 2005
  • Joseph and His Brothers
    Joseph and His Brothers
    Translated and Introduced by John E. Woods
    Thomas Mann
    978-1-4000-4001-8
    $42.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 10, 2005
  • The House of the Spirits
    The House of the Spirits
    Introduced by Christopher Hitchens
    Isabel Allende
    978-1-4000-4318-7
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 19, 2005
  • The Woman Warrior, China Men
    The Woman Warrior, China Men
    Introduction by Mary Gordon
    Maxine Hong Kingston
    978-1-4000-4384-2
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 12, 2005
  • The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays
    The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays
    Introduction by David Bellos
    Albert Camus
    978-1-4000-4255-5
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 17, 2004
  • Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham
    Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham
    Introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare
    W. Somerset Maugham
    978-1-4000-4253-1
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 06, 2004
  • Beloved
    Beloved
    Toni Morrison
    978-1-4000-3341-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 08, 2004
  • Song of Solomon
    Song of Solomon
    Toni Morrison
    978-1-4000-3342-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 08, 2004
  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver's Seat, The Only Problem
    The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver's Seat, The Only Problem
    Introduction by Frank Kermode
    Muriel Spark
    978-1-4000-4206-7
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 06, 2004
  • A Thousand Acres
    A Thousand Acres
    A Novel
    Jane Smiley
    978-1-4000-3383-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Anchor
    Dec 02, 2003
  • The General in His Labyrinth
    The General in His Labyrinth
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-1-4000-3470-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 07, 2003
  • Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring
    Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring
    Introduction by John Bayley
    Penelope Fitzgerald
    978-1-4000-4125-1
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 23, 2003
  • The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower
    The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower
    Introduction by Frank Kermode
    Penelope Fitzgerald
    978-1-4000-4126-8
    $27.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 23, 2003
  • The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories
    The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories
    Introduction by Robert Polito
    James M. Cain
    978-0-375-41438-1
    $27.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 22, 2003
  • Zeno's Conscience
    Zeno's Conscience
    A Novel
    Italo Svevo
    978-0-375-72776-4
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 04, 2003
  • Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler
    Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler
    Introduction by John Bayley
    Raymond Chandler
    978-0-375-41500-5
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 15, 2002
  • The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window
    The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window
    Introduction by Diane Johnson
    Raymond Chandler
    978-0-375-41501-2
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 15, 2002
  • The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback
    The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback
    Introduction by Tom Hiney
    Raymond Chandler
    978-0-375-41502-9
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 15, 2002
  • Orwell: Essays
    Orwell: Essays
    Introduction by John Carey
    George Orwell
    978-0-375-41503-6
    $42.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 15, 2002
  • My Name Is Red
    My Name Is Red
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-0-375-70685-1
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 27, 2002
  • The Rainbow
    The Rainbow
    D.H. Lawrence
    978-0-375-75965-9
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Feb 12, 2002
  • The Cairo Trilogy
    The Cairo Trilogy
    Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street; Introduction by Sabry Hafez
    Naguib Mahfouz
    978-0-375-41331-5
    $40.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 16, 2001
  • The Complete Henry Bech
    The Complete Henry Bech
    Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
    John Updike
    978-0-375-41176-2
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 27, 2001
  • A House for Mr. Biswas
    A House for Mr. Biswas
    A Novel
    V. S. Naipaul
    978-0-375-70716-2
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 13, 2001
  • Of Human Bondage
    Of Human Bondage
    W. Somerset Maugham
    978-0-375-75315-2
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Modern Library
    Mar 02, 1999
  • The Diary of a Young Girl
    The Diary of a Young Girl
    The Definitive Edition
    Anne Frank
    978-0-553-57712-9
    $7.99 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Bantam
    Feb 03, 1997
  • Life and Fate
    Life and Fate
    Introduction by Polly Jones
    Vasily Grossman
    978-0-593-32126-3
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 24, 2022
  • The Pursuit of Love; Love in a Cold Climate
    The Pursuit of Love; Love in a Cold Climate
    Introduction by Laura Thompson
    Nancy Mitford
    978-0-593-32127-0
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 22, 2022
  • The Sun Also Rises
    The Sun Also Rises
    Introduction by Nicholas Gaskill
    Ernest Hemingway
    978-0-593-32128-7
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 22, 2022
  • The Bridge on the Drina
    The Bridge on the Drina
    Introduction by Misha Glenny
    Ivo Andric
    978-0-593-32022-8
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 02, 2021
  • The Famished Road
    The Famished Road
    Introduction by Vanessa Guignery
    Ben Okri
    978-0-593-32025-9
    $26.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 07, 2021
  • The Great Gatsby
    The Great Gatsby
    Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-1-101-90829-7
    $22.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 05, 2021
  • Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore
    Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore
    Introduction by Lauren Groff
    Lorrie Moore
    978-0-375-71238-8
    $27.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 03, 2020
  • A Bend in the River
    A Bend in the River
    Introduction by Patrick Marnham
    V. S. Naipaul
    978-1-101-90819-8
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Dec 03, 2019
  • Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen
    Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen
    Introduction by John Banville
    Elizabeth Bowen
    978-1-101-90818-1
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 15, 2019
  • Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang
    Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang
    Introduction by Paul Giles
    Peter Carey
    978-1-101-90820-4
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 03, 2019
  • The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I
    The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I
    American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
    James Ellroy
    978-1-101-90804-4
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 04, 2019
  • The L.A. Quartet
    The L.A. Quartet
    The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz; Introduction by Tom Nolan
    James Ellroy
    978-1-101-90805-1
    $40.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 04, 2019
  • The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume II
    The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume II
    Blood's A Rover
    James Ellroy
    978-1-101-90814-3
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 04, 2019
  • Lucky Per
    Lucky Per
    Introduction by Garth Risk Hallberg
    Henrik Pontoppidan
    978-1-101-90809-9
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 16, 2019
  • All Quiet on the Western Front
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    Introduction by Norman Stone
    Erich Maria Remarque
    978-1-101-90808-2
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 18, 2018
  • Goodbye to All That
    Goodbye to All That
    Introduction by Miranda Seymour
    Robert Graves
    978-1-101-90798-6
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 24, 2018
  • The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children, Fireworks
    The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children, Fireworks
    Introduction by Joan Acocella
    Angela Carter
    978-1-101-90799-3
    $27.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 10, 2018
  • The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities
    The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities
    Introduction by Rachel Kushner
    Marguerite Duras
    978-1-101-90793-1
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 14, 2017
  • Rebecca
    Rebecca
    Introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
    Daphne du Maurier
    978-1-101-90787-0
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 07, 2017
  • The Collected Stories of Francine Prose
    The Collected Stories of Francine Prose
    Introduction by Francine Prose
    Mavis Gallant
    978-1-101-90763-4
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 09, 2016
  • The Sea, the Sea; A Severed Head
    The Sea, the Sea; A Severed Head
    Introduction by Sarah Churchwell
    Iris Murdoch
    978-1-101-90766-5
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 05, 2016
  • Go Tell It on the Mountain
    Go Tell It on the Mountain
    Introduction by Edwidge Danticat
    James Baldwin
    978-1-101-90761-0
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 01, 2016
  • Giovanni's Room
    Giovanni's Room
    Introduction by Colm Tóibín
    James Baldwin
    978-1-101-90774-0
    $22.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 01, 2016
  • The Adventures of Augie March
    The Adventures of Augie March
    Introduction by Martin Amis
    Saul Bellow
    978-1-101-90771-9
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 04, 2015
  • The Book of Evidence, The Sea
    The Book of Evidence, The Sea
    Introduction by Adam Phillips
    John Banville
    978-0-375-71272-2
    $25.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 21, 2015
  • Hopscotch, Blow-Up, We Love Glenda So Much
    Hopscotch, Blow-Up, We Love Glenda So Much
    Introduction by Ilan Stavans
    Julio Cortazar
    978-0-375-71266-1
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 12, 2014
  • The Transylvanian Trilogy, Volume I
    The Transylvanian Trilogy, Volume I
    They Were Counted; Introduction by Hugh Thomas
    Miklos Banffy
    978-0-375-71229-6
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 02, 2013
  • The Transylvanian Trilogy, Volumes II & III
    The Transylvanian Trilogy, Volumes II & III
    They Were Found Wanting, They Were Divided; Introduction by Patrick Thursfield
    Miklos Banffy
    978-0-375-71230-2
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 02, 2013
  • Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
    Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
    Introduction by Sarah Churchwell
    Julian Barnes
    978-0-307-96143-3
    $28.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 02, 2012
  • Voss
    Voss
    Introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare
    Patrick White
    978-0-307-96149-5
    $24.95 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 02, 2012
  • The Siege of Krishnapur, Troubles
    The Siege of Krishnapur, Troubles
    Introduction by John Sutherland
    J.G. Farrell
    978-0-307-95784-9
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 06, 2012
  • The Skeptical Romancer
    The Skeptical Romancer
    Selected Travel Writing
    W. Somerset Maugham
    978-0-307-47318-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 14, 2012
  • Parade's End
    Parade's End
    Ford Madox Ford
    978-0-307-74420-3
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 03, 2012
  • His Dark Materials
    His Dark Materials
    The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass; Introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
    Philip Pullman
    978-0-307-95783-2
    $38.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Dec 06, 2011
  • Doctor Zhivago
    Doctor Zhivago
    Boris Pasternak
    978-0-307-39095-0
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 04, 2011
  • A Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread
    A Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread
    Introduction by Ann Pasternak Slater
    E.M. Forster
    978-0-307-70090-2
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 04, 2011
  • Collected Short Fiction of V. S. Naipaul
    Collected Short Fiction of V. S. Naipaul
    V. S. Naipaul
    978-0-307-59402-0
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 12, 2011
  • Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air
    Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air
    Introduction by John Carey
    George Orwell
    978-0-307-59504-1
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 05, 2011
  • Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation
    Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation
    Introduction by Michael Dirda
    Isaac Asimov
    978-0-307-59396-2
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Nov 02, 2010
  • The Stories of Ray Bradbury
    The Stories of Ray Bradbury
    Introduction by Christopher Buckley
    Ray Bradbury
    978-0-307-26905-8
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 06, 2010
  • Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game
    Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game
    Introduction by Michael Dirda
    George MacDonald Fraser
    978-0-307-59268-2
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Feb 02, 2010
  • The African Trilogy
    The African Trilogy
    Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God; Introduction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    Chinua Achebe
    978-0-307-59270-5
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 05, 2010
  • This Side of Paradise
    This Side of Paradise
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    978-0-307-47451-3
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 08, 2009
  • The Best of Frank O'Connor
    The Best of Frank O'Connor
    Introduction by Julian Barnes
    Frank O'Connor
    978-0-307-26904-1
    $27.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 09, 2009
  • The Bascombe Novels
    The Bascombe Novels
    Written and Introduced by Richard Ford
    Richard Ford
    978-0-307-26903-4
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 14, 2009
  • Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
    Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
    Introduction by Richard Price
    Richard Yates
    978-0-307-27089-4
    $27.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 06, 2009
  • David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair
    David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair
    Introduction by Claire Messud
    Irene Nemirovsky
    978-0-307-26708-5
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 15, 2008
  • The Complete Novels of Flann O'Brien
    The Complete Novels of Flann O'Brien
    Introduction by Keith Donohue
    Flann O'Brien
    978-0-307-26749-8
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jan 08, 2008
  • The Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran
    The Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran
    Kahlil Gibran
    978-0-307-26707-8
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 23, 2007
  • Love in the Time of Cholera
    Love in the Time of Cholera
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-0-307-38973-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 05, 2007
  • The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories
    The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories
    Introduction by James Ellroy
    Dashiell Hammett
    978-0-307-26669-9
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 04, 2007
  • The Raj Quartet (1)
    The Raj Quartet (1)
    The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion; Introduction by Hilary Spurling
    Paul Scott
    978-0-307-26396-4
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 03, 2007
  • The Raj Quartet (2)
    The Raj Quartet (2)
    The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils; Introduction by Hilary Spurling
    Paul Scott
    978-0-307-26397-1
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 03, 2007
  • The Best of Wodehouse
    The Best of Wodehouse
    An Anthology; Introduction by John Mortimer
    P.G. Wodehouse
    978-0-307-26661-3
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jun 19, 2007
  • Three Novels of Ancient Egypt: Khufu's Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War
    Three Novels of Ancient Egypt: Khufu's Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War
    Introduction by Nadine Gordimer
    Naguib Mahfouz
    978-0-307-26624-8
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 27, 2007
  • The Handmaid's Tale
    The Handmaid's Tale
    Introduction by Valerie Martin
    Margaret Atwood
    978-0-307-26460-2
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 17, 2006
  • We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
    We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
    Collected Nonfiction; Introduction by John Leonard
    Joan Didion
    978-0-307-26487-9
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 17, 2006
  • Collected Stories of Roald Dahl
    Collected Stories of Roald Dahl
    Introduction by Jeremy Treglown
    Roald Dahl
    978-0-307-26490-9
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 17, 2006
  • Carried Away
    Carried Away
    A Personal Selection of Stories; Introduction by Margaret Atwood
    Alice Munro
    978-0-307-26486-2
    $27.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 26, 2006
  • The Name of the Rose
    The Name of the Rose
    Introduction by David Lodge
    Umberto Eco
    978-0-307-26489-3
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 26, 2006
  • Midnight's Children
    Midnight's Children
    A Novel
    Salman Rushdie
    978-0-8129-7653-3
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Random House Trade Paperbacks
    Apr 04, 2006
  • Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher
    Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher
    Introduction by Alexander McCall Smith
    R. K. Narayan
    978-1-4000-4476-4
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 07, 2006
  • Mr. Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma
    Mr. Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma
    Introduction by Alexander McCall Smith
    R. K. Narayan
    978-1-4000-4477-1
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Mar 07, 2006
  • Snow
    Snow
    Orhan Pamuk
    978-0-375-70686-8
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 19, 2005
  • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
    The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
    Introduction by Tim Parks
    Giorgio Bassani
    978-1-4000-4422-1
    $23.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 19, 2005
  • Joseph and His Brothers
    Joseph and His Brothers
    Translated and Introduced by John E. Woods
    Thomas Mann
    978-1-4000-4001-8
    $42.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    May 10, 2005
  • The House of the Spirits
    The House of the Spirits
    Introduced by Christopher Hitchens
    Isabel Allende
    978-1-4000-4318-7
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 19, 2005
  • The Woman Warrior, China Men
    The Woman Warrior, China Men
    Introduction by Mary Gordon
    Maxine Hong Kingston
    978-1-4000-4384-2
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 12, 2005
  • The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays
    The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays
    Introduction by David Bellos
    Albert Camus
    978-1-4000-4255-5
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Aug 17, 2004
  • Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham
    Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham
    Introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare
    W. Somerset Maugham
    978-1-4000-4253-1
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 06, 2004
  • Beloved
    Beloved
    Toni Morrison
    978-1-4000-3341-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 08, 2004
  • Song of Solomon
    Song of Solomon
    Toni Morrison
    978-1-4000-3342-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 08, 2004
  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver's Seat, The Only Problem
    The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver's Seat, The Only Problem
    Introduction by Frank Kermode
    Muriel Spark
    978-1-4000-4206-7
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Apr 06, 2004
  • A Thousand Acres
    A Thousand Acres
    A Novel
    Jane Smiley
    978-1-4000-3383-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Anchor
    Dec 02, 2003
  • The General in His Labyrinth
    The General in His Labyrinth
    Gabriel García Márquez
    978-1-4000-3470-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 07, 2003
  • Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring
    Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring
    Introduction by John Bayley
    Penelope Fitzgerald
    978-1-4000-4125-1
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 23, 2003
  • The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower
    The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower
    Introduction by Frank Kermode
    Penelope Fitzgerald
    978-1-4000-4126-8
    $27.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Sep 23, 2003
  • The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories
    The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories
    Introduction by Robert Polito
    James M. Cain
    978-0-375-41438-1
    $27.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Jul 22, 2003
  • Zeno's Conscience
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    Italo Svevo
    978-0-375-72776-4
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 04, 2003
  • Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler
    Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler
    Introduction by John Bayley
    Raymond Chandler
    978-0-375-41500-5
    $35.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 15, 2002
  • The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window
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    978-0-375-41501-2
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    Everyman's Library
    Oct 15, 2002
  • The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback
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    Introduction by Tom Hiney
    Raymond Chandler
    978-0-375-41502-9
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 15, 2002
  • Orwell: Essays
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    George Orwell
    978-0-375-41503-6
    $42.00 US
    Hardcover
    Everyman's Library
    Oct 15, 2002
  • My Name Is Red
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    978-0-375-70685-1
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
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    Aug 27, 2002
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    978-0-375-75965-9
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    Feb 12, 2002
  • The Cairo Trilogy
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    978-0-375-41331-5
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    Everyman's Library
    Oct 16, 2001
  • The Complete Henry Bech
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    Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
    John Updike
    978-0-375-41176-2
    $25.00 US
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    Mar 27, 2001
  • A House for Mr. Biswas
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    A Novel
    V. S. Naipaul
    978-0-375-70716-2
    $18.00 US
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    Mar 13, 2001
  • Of Human Bondage
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    Mar 02, 1999
  • The Diary of a Young Girl
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