She's just trying to get the story as straight as she can, mainly so that she can understand it herself, and I found her efforts extremely moving. She's evidently spent her whole life wondering why she behaved the way she did, and she still doesn't really know. She's giving herself the blame for what happened. The novel, we finally learn, has been written by the girl herself. Well, it seems to me that this is completely beside the point. She didn't know what she was doing, they say she was too young to understand the import of her actions, and we shouldn't hold her responsible. Some people seem appalled that the author is putting the guilt for this dreadful tragedy on the shoulders of a young girl. But I disagree so strongly with some of the opinions expressed that I'm afraid I have to exercise my right to reply. There are many reviews already of this book, and I did wonder whether the world needed any more. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004).

He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

Atonement by Ian McEwan