Atonement

Description

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

Christopher Hampton was born in the Azores in 1946. As a child he travelled around Aden, Egypt and Zanzibar. He was educated at Lancing College and in 1966 he went to New College, Oxford to study German and French, graduating in 1969 with a First Class degree. He wrote his first play, When Did You Last See Your Mother?, at the age of eighteen. It was first performed by Oxford undergraduates and subsequently moved to the Royal Court in June 1966. Since then, Christopher Hampton has worked on numerous original plays, adaptations and translations in the theatre, television and cinema. Hampton's plays are published by Faber in its Contemporary Classics series.