The structure of the novel perfectly suits the story. Robbie had also studied at Cambridge and, after graduating with a first in English, was seriously considering to return to university to study Medicine. Cecilia’s mother seemed to harbour some resentment about it. Not everyone in the family was happy about that. Cecilia’s father had always paid for Robbie’s education, whose mother was a cleaning lady at the house. Although they grew up together, it took them some time to realise that their relationship was evolving into something deeper. There’s a palpable and believable romantic tension between Cecilia and Robbie since the beginning, even before they realised their loving feelings for one another. Her inventive mind and ignorance about adult relationships led her to commit a grave mistake that she tried to atone for later in life. Later, after Robbie asked Briony to deliver a letter to Cecilia, her misinterpretation of their relationship became even greater. She couldn’t hear them, but her prolific imagination was immediately ignited by the events that she witnessed. Cecilia stripped off her clothes and plunged into the fountain to get them back.įrom a window, Briony saw Cecilia and Robbie near the fountain. The lip of the vase broke, though, and two pieces fell in the water.

Nearby was Robbie Turner who tried to help her fill the vase with water on the fountain in the garden. After picking some wild flowers to put in the room where a friend of Leon’s, the chocolate magnate Paul Marshall, was going to stay, she decided to arrange them in an expensive vase. Although her cousins were not too excited to act in the play at first, they ended up assenting to.Ĭecilia, Briony’s older sister, had also recently returned home from Cambridge. The twins Jackson and Pierrot were nine years old, and Lola, who liked to act as a grown-up, was fifteen. Her decision to embrace a new format was inspired by the presence of her cousins, whose parents were getting divorced.

On a day in the summer of 1935, at the age of thirteen, she decided to write and stage a play, ‘The Trials of Arabella’, to welcome home her brother Leon.

This story about how the imagination of a clueless girl has devastating consequences on the lives of others is a literary feast, which is written in an engaging prose and is full of unforgettable moments between the characters.īriony had been writing stories since she was very young. I first read this fully immersive book in Portuguese more than a decade ago and have now (re)read it in the original. It is novels such as Atonement by Ian McEwan that attest to the magic of the written word.

Atonement ian