Briony is a famous novelist in her seventies. In the last part of the novel, it's nearly 50 years on. Briony, matured by her hospital experience, goes to ask forgiveness of her sister. The bloody, chaotic shambles of the retreat sabotages one common national fantasy, of Dunkirk as a heroic rescue - a view of history consistent with all McEwan's previous work. Two long sections describe, with unsparing, closely researched, gripping relentlessness, the retreat to Dunkirk, as experienced by Robbie and his two (splendidly done) comrades-at-arms and by Nurse Briony Tallis in St Thomas's Hospital.

Both she and Briony (who are estranged) have gone into nursing. Robbie has been let out of prison to join the infantry, and Cecilia is waiting for him to 'come back'. By the end of the day, Robbie and Cecilia have discovered they are passionately in love, the twins have run away, Lola has been raped, Briony has accused Robbie of the assault and he has been arrested, and The Trials of Arabella has never been produced. The play is meant to welcome home her brother, who arrives with a rich, stupid young businessman. Into this household, one fatal day (as Briony might put it) come Hermione's neglected children: sexy, manipulative teenage Lola, and two pathetic twin brothers, whom Briony immediately ropes in to be in her play, a wonderful and absurd farrago called The Trials of Arabella. Handsome Robbie Turner is the family protégé: his mother is the charlady, and the Tallises have helped him get to Cambridge he wants to be a doctor. The son is an affable joker the older daughter, Cecilia, has been to Cambridge but is now at a loss and her sister, Briony, is a ferociously orderly child 'possessed by a desire to have the world just so' - a desire that takes the form of writing.

The mother, Emily, is withdrawn into illness, and dogged by a life-long resentment of her self-pleasing sister, a promisingly reckless off-stage character called Hermione. The father is away in London, involved in mysterious defence plans at the Ministry and a long-standing affair. The Tallis family, inheritors of a 'baronial-Gothic' late-nineteenth-century mansion in Surrey with vestiges of a more elegant Adam-style house (a fountain, a temple) in the extensive grounds, aren't quite as solid as their house makes them look. It is 1935, the summer of an intense heatwave and rumours of war. The two main characters, Robbie Turner and Briony Tallis, are placed, in the first part of the novel, in an English setting of deceptive placidity.

2001 ian mcewan novel