Atonement

A country house in the Surrey heat of 1935, where a girl's misreading of one scene wrecks three lives, then the war that follows it: a soldier's long walk to the beaches of Dunkirk, and the London wards where the two sisters nurse the wounded. The map anchors on southern England, from the Surrey estate to wartime Lambeth and Balham, and reaches across the Channel to the French coast of the retreat.

Briony Tallis

The Tallis house, Surrey

Part One

On a hot day in 1935 the whole first movement unfolds at a wealthy family's country house and its grounds, where a thirteen-year-old watches a scene by the fountain, and later another in the dark, and reads both wrongly. Her false accusation sends her sister's lover to prison and severs the family. McEwan sites the estate in Surrey without naming a town, so the pin stands for that lost English house rather than a surviving address.

Part One

inspired by The house is invented and never given a real address; the novel only places the estate in the Surrey countryside, so this marks a representative point in rural Surrey south-west of Guildford. The 2007 film used Stokesay Court in Shropshire, which is a screen substitute rather than the book's location.

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