On the hottest day of 1935, Briony Tallis witnesses a crime. And what the 13-year-old sets in motion with a lie wreaks havoc, changing lives forever.

Ian McEwan’s characters are constantly in motion, underscoring the restlessness of prewar England, of young men and women at the verge of their sexuality and of a woman trying to find her voice as a writer, regardless of the consequences.

More than anything, “Atonement” (Doubleday, 351 pages, $26) is a great story and McEwan is a great storyteller. The book is saturated with dark undercurrents and shocking twists, with a smattering of small clues throughout.

The story starts at the Tallis family’s country estate in England. Briony, a future novelist, is frustrated because her younger cousins, who were cast in a play she wrote for her brother’s return, won’t cooperate. Then Briony sees her older sister, Cecilia, remove her clothes and enter a fountain as the housekeeper’s son, Robbie, watches.

“The very complexity of her feelings confirmed Briony in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and disassembling from which her writing was bound to benefit. What fairy tale ever held so much by way of contradiction? … No more princesses! The scene at the fountain, its air of ugly threat, and at the end, when both had gone their separate ways, the luminous absence shimmering above the wetness on the gravel all this would have to be reconsidered.”

A moonless night, a sexual transgression, missing children, a cheating spouse, a bombshell in an envelope they’re all there, in a household held together by lies. The family in a portrait hanging on the wall is not the Tallises. The cheating father stays in London. Even the house is not the original.

McEwan’s description of war is evocative, from a London hospital to France as troops prepare for the massive evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940. An enlisted Robbie crosses the countryside, haunted by such images as a child’s arm, still in its pajama sleeve, stuck in a tree.

The book also touches on the novelist’s role in life: how she plays God with her creations, and how her “Atonement” is so elusive.