Join the HCSF Reading Group to discuss Atonement by Ian McEwan
In-Person Meeting
Sunday, January 11, 2026
4:30-6:00 pm Pacific
In-Person, San Francisco
Address emailed to registrants the week of the meeting
HCSF Members: Free, but RSVP required
Non-Members: $10 Not a member? Register here for membership!
Please sign in with your HarvardKey otherwise a duplicate record will be created and you will not be able to log-in.
No HarvardKey? Please retrieve your HarvardKey here. If you need help, email ithelp@harvard.edu or call 617-495-7777
HCSF Guidelines for attending in-person events
If you are showing COVID-19 or Flu symptoms, please stay home. This is critical to the health and safety of our staff and communities.
Registration ends Friday, January 9
Atonement
Ian McEwan 2002 351 pages
#26 on the NYT Best Books of the 21st Century
Shortlisted for 2001 Booker Prize
Widely regarded as McEwan's best
in 2007, book adapted into a BAFTA and Academy Award-winning film, directed by Joe Wright.
Atonement is set in three time periods: 1935 England, WWII England and France, and present-day England.
"Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done, or so the saying goes. But what a naïve, peevish 13-year-old named Briony Tallis sets in motion when she sees her older sister flirting with the son of a servant in hopelessly stratified pre-war England surpasses disastrous; it’s catastrophic. It’s also a testament to the piercing elegance of McEwan’s prose that “Atonement” makes us care so much." (New York Times)
"McEwan’s epigraph is from Jane Austen, and promises a spacious family novel of humorous interplay, romantic intrigues, and near-tragic misunderstandings. The promise is to some extent kept; the homesick twins and the blossoming, manipulative Lola inject disturbance into the stagnant Tallis household. But in the warmth of these days, the summer's hottest, a Virginia Woolfian shimmer overlays the Austenish plot, which keeps threatening to dissolve." (The New Yorker)
Questions about our meetings or how we choose our books?
Contact Kirsten Miclau
HCSF Reading Group Organizer
readinggroup@harvardclubsf.org