Ian McEwan

Atonement (2001) is a novel by British writer Ian McEwan. It is widely regarded as one of McEwan's best works and was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction, an award that he had already won for his previous novel, Amsterdam. In addition, Time Magazine named it the best fiction novel of the year and included it in All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels. McEwan utilizes several important stylistic techniques in the novel, including metafiction and psychological realism. Atonement contains intertextual references to a number of other literary works including Henry James' The Golden Bowl, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Shakespeare's The Tempest. In late 2006, Lucilla Andrews' autobiography No Time for Romance became the focus of a posthumous controversy, when it was alleged that the novelist Ian McEwan plagiarized from this work while writing his highly-acclaimed novel, Atonement. McEwan has protested his innocence.