Read the book before you see the film

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
This highly original first novel won the largest advance San
Francisco-based MacAdam/Cage had ever paid, and it was money well
spent. Niffenegger has written a soaring love story illuminated by
dozens of finely observed details and scenes, and one that skates
nimbly around a huge conundrum at the heart of the book: Henry De
Tamble, a rather dashing librarian at the famous Newberry Library in
Chicago, finds himself unavoidably whisked around in time. He
disappears from a scene in, say, 1998 to find himself suddenly,
usually without his clothes, which mysteriously disappear in transit,
at an entirely different place 10 years earlier-or later. During one
of these migrations, he drops in on beautiful teenage Clare Abshire,
an heiress in a large house on the nearby Michigan peninsula, and a
lifelong passion is born. The problem is that while Henry's age darts
back and forth according to his location in time, Clare's moves
forward in the normal manner, so the pair are often out of sync. But
such is the author's tenderness with the characters, and the
determinedly ungimmicky way in which she writes of their predicament
[...] that the book is much more love story than fantasy. It also has
a splendidly drawn cast, from Henry's violinist father [...] to
Clare's odd family and a multitude of Chicago bohemian friends. [...]
It is a fair tribute to her skill and sensibility to say that the book
leaves a reader with an impression of life's riches and strangeness
rather than of easy thrills.

Atonement by Ian McEwan
From Publishers Weekly
This haunting novel, which just failed to win the Booker this year, is
at once McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically
penetrating, and his most sweeping and expansive. It is in effect two,
or even three, books in one, all masterfully crafted. The first part
ushers us into a domestic crisis that becomes a crime story centered
around an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an
upper-middle-class country home on a hot English summer's day in 1935.
Young Briony Tallis, a hyperimaginative 13-year-old who sees her older
sister, Cecilia, mysteriously involved with their neighbor Robbie
Turner, a fellow Cambridge student subsidized by the Tallis family,
points a finger at Robbie when her young cousin is assaulted in the
grounds that night; on her testimony alone, Robbie is jailed. The
second part of the book moves forward five years to focus on Robbie,
now freed and part of the British Army that was cornered and
eventually evacuated by a fleet of small boats at Dunkirk during the
early days of WWII. This is an astonishingly imagined fresco that
bares the full anguish of what Britain in later years came to see as a
kind of victory. In the third part, Briony becomes a nurse amid
wonderfully observed scenes of London as the nation mobilizes. No, she
doesn't have Robbie as a patient, but she begins to come to terms with
what she has done and offers to make amends to him and Cecilia, now
together as lovers. In an ironic epilogue that is yet another coup de
the tre, McEwan offers Briony as an elderly novelist today, revisiting
her past in fact and fancy and contributing a moving windup to the
sustained flight of a deeply novelistic imagination.