So I read Atonement last winter, right when the movie came out (the book was sitting on my shelf for years, but once I had the chance to groan at Keira Knightly in another literary adaptation, I finally got around to it). I was talking to my friend Ellen about it and she asked if I had read On Chesil Beach--"Atonement is like being beaten with a sack full of feathers, but On Chesil Beach is like being beaten with a sack full of rocks," she said gleefully.
Her comment is oddly accurate. The fight on the beach between the two main characters is dead-on, painful and disturbingly real. The tension between the two (and between what they want and what they say to each other) is excrutiating.
I read it in two days flat.
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