Atonement, by Ian McEwan

I heard my wife rave about this book for over a year before I decided to read it. McEwan's prose is everything that she told me and perhaps more. He tells a very sad story in this book, but in a way that is so deeply emotional that you don't mind being hit by a feeling of sadness as you go along. He is able to demonstrate his characters feelings better than most of the authors that I've been reading recently and makes them feel very, very real. The plot is centered on one moment, one tiny little event that goes on to have a devastating effect on the lives of several people. I really enjoyed it. Although the movie made from the book stands on its own as being decent, McEwan's prose is so precise and well thought out that you will not want to see the movie, if you've read the book first. Although some of the images in the movie matched closely what the book conjured up in my mind, the not quite linear way in which the story is told didn't translate so well to the screen.