![]() ![]() In the third part, Briony becomes a nurse amid wonderfully observed scenes of London as the nation mobilizes. This is an astonishingly imagined fresco that bares the full anguish of what Britain in later years came to see as a kind of victory. ![]() The second part of the book moves forward five years to focus on Robbie, now freed and part of the British Army that was cornered and eventually evacuated by a fleet of small boats at Dunkirk during the early days of WWII. Young Briony Tallis, a hyperimaginative 13-year-old who sees her older sister, Cecilia, mysteriously involved with their neighbor Robbie Turner, a fellow Cambridge student subsidized by the Tallis family, points a finger at Robbie when her young cousin is assaulted in the grounds that night on her testimony alone, Robbie is jailed. The first part ushers us into a domestic crisis that becomes a crime story centered around an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an upper-middle-class country home on a hot English summer's day in 1935. It is in effect two, or even three, books in one, all masterfully crafted. ![]() This haunting novel, which just failed to win the Booker this year, is at once McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating, and his most sweeping and expansive. ![]()
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