Atonement (novel) Atonement (novel) Atonement is a 2001 British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan concerning the understanding of and responding to the need for personal atonement. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing. Widely regarded as one of McEwan's best works, it was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction. In 2010, "TIME" magazine named "Atonement" in its list of the 100 greatest English-language novels
Atonement in Christianity a "both/and." J. Kenneth Grider, quoted above showing the compatibility of various atonement models with the governmental theory, nevertheless also says that both penal substitution and satisfaction atonement theories are incompatible with the governmental theory. Some confusion can occur when discussing the atonement because the terms used sometimes have differing meanings depending on the contexts in which they are used. For example: Early speculation regarding the nature of the atonement was couched in terminology drawn from custom and law. William Kent notes that the Atonement "...is represented as the payment of a price, or a ransom, or as the offering