Margaret Atwood

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BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR


Title: The Blind Assassin: Description:
"It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward," writes Margaret Atwood, towards the end of her impressive and complex new novel, The Blind Assassin. It's a melancholic account of why writers write--and readers read--and one that frames the different lives told through this book. The Blind Assassin is (at least) two novels. At the end of her life, Iris Griffen takes up her pen to record the secret history of her family, the romantic melodrama of its decline and fall between the two World Wars. Conjuring a world of prosperity and misery, marriage and loneliness, the central enigma of Iris's tale is the death of her sister, Laura Chase, who "drove a car off a bridge" at the end of the Second World War. Suicide or accident? The story gradually unfolds, interspersed with sketches of Iris's present-day life--confined by age and ill-health--and a second novel, The Blind Assassin by Laura Chase. Allowing a glimpse into a clandestine love affair between a privileged young woman and a radical "agitator" on the run, this version of The Blind Assassin is an overt act of seduction: the exchange of sex and story about an imaginary world of Sakiel-Norn (a play with the potential, and convention, of fantasy and sci-fi). With the intelligence, subtlety and remarkable characterisation associated with Atwood's writing (from her first novel, The Edible Woman through to the best-selling Alias Grace), these two stories play with one another--sustaining an uncertainty about who has done what to who and why to the very end of this compelling book. --Vicky Lebeau

Title: Bodily Harm: Description:
Rennie Wilford, a young journalist running for her life, takes an assignment on a Caribbean island and tumbles into a world where people are not what they seem. When a burnt-out Yankee offers Rennie a no-hooks, no-strings affair, she is caught up in a lethal web of corruption.

Title: Murder In The Dark: Short Fictions And Prose Poems: Description:
A leathery bog-man transforms an old love affair; a sweet, gruesome gift is sent by the wife of an ex-lover; landscape paintings are haunted by the ghost of a young girl. This dazzling collection of 10 short stories takes us into familiar Atwood territory to reveal the logic of irrational behaviour and the many textures lying beneath ordinary life. These short fictons and prose poems are bizarre: bread can no longer be conceived as wholesome comforting loaves and a poisonous brew is concocted by cynical five-year-olds. Intent on breaking the forces of convention, this collection should captivate the reader's imagination.

Title: The Edible Woman: Description:
Marian is determinedly ordinary - she likes her work, her broody flatmate and her fiance Peter. All goes well at first, but she has reckoned without an inner self that wants more. Marriage a la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can't stomach.

Title: Bluebeards Egg: Description:
AN ACUTE AND POETIC OBSERVER OF THE ETERNAL, UNIVERSAL, RUM RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN - THE TIMES

Title: Alias Grace: Description:
In 1843, a 16-year-old Canadian housemaid named Grace Marks was tried for the murder of her employer and his mistress. The sensationalistic trial made headlines throughout the world, and the jury delivered a guilty verdict. Yet opinion remained fiercely divided about Marks- -was she a spurned woman who had taken out her rage on two innocent victims, or was she an unwilling victim herself, caught up in a crime she was too young to understand? Such doubts persuaded the judges to commute her sentence to life imprisonment, and Marks spent the next 30 years in an assortment of jails and asylums, where she was often exhibited as a star attraction. In Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood reconstructs Marks's story in fictional form. Her portraits of 19th-century prison and asylum life are chilling in their detail. The author also introduces Dr Simon Jordan, who listens to the prisoner's tale with a mixture of sympathy and disbelief. In his effort to uncover the truth, Jordan uses the tools of the then rudimentary science of psychology. But the last word belongs to the book's narrator--Grace herself.

Title: Life Before Man (contemporary Classics): Description:
Elizabeth, monstrous yet pitiable; Nate, her husband, a patchwork man, gentle disillusioned; Lesje, a young woman at the natural history museum, for whom dinosaurs are as important as men. A sexual triangle; three people in thrall to the tragicomedy we call love ...

Title: Lady Oracle: Description:
From fat girl to thin, from red hair to mud brown, from London to Toronto, from Polish count to radical husband - Joan Foster is utterly confused by her life of multiple identities. She decides to escape to an italian hill town to take stock of her life. But first, she must organise her death ...

Title: Dancing Girls And Other Stories (contemporary Classics): Description:
Pregnant women, students and journalists; farmers, birdwatchers, ex-wives, adolescent lovers - and dancing girls. All ordinary people - or are they?

Title: The Robber Bride: Description:
London: Virago, 2002. First published in 1994. Zenia is beautiful, smart and greedy; by turns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless; a man's dream and a woman's nightmare. She is also dead. Just to make absolutely sure Tony, Roz and Chris are there for the funeral. But five years on, as the three women share a sisterly lunch, the impossible happens: 'with waves of ill will flowing out of her like cosmic radiation', Zenia is back ...

Title: The Handmaid's Tale (contemporary Classics): Description:
The Republic of Gilead allows Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like all dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neithe Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs ...

Title: Surfacing: Description:
A young woman returns to northern Quebec to the remote island of her childhood, with her lover and two friends, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her father. Flooded with memories, she begins to realise that going home means not only entering another place, but also another time. As the wild island exerts its elemental hold and she is submerged in the language of the wilderness, she sees that what she is really looking for is her own past.

Title: Cat's Eye: Description:
Margaret Atwood charts the psychological process of memory as compulsion and memory as a healing act through the character of Elaine Risley, an artist who returns to her home town of Toronto for a retrospective of her work. Elaine's visit triggers thoughts of her childhood with all the urgency of a bad rash. Dominating her reflections are her childhood "friends", three girls who wreak havoc on Elaine's self-esteem. Having spent her early childhood on the road with an entomologist father, a less than traditional mother and a brother more concerned with snot and snakes than the intricate behaviour codes of girls, the young Elaine is vulnerable to the indirect aggression of Cordelia, the ringleader of the group who seeks to improve her. Through Elaine's experiences, Margaret Atwood turns a keen and ironic eye on the training of females in North American culture: "All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans out of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I've done it badly." The self-effacement of these girl-children barely masks a need for power that erupts all too often in cruel forms of play. This is a story in which the lines between victims and oppressors blur, in which forgiveness becomes an act of gaining power. Through humour, pain and insight, she makes us see, with surprise and recognition, details from childhood we may well have forgotten. --Chris Kellett, From 500 Great Books by Women

Title: The Penelopiad: The Myth Of Penelope And Odysseus: Description:
In Homer's "Odyssey", Penelope - wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy - is portrayed as the quintessential faithful wife, her story a salutary lesson through the ages. Left alone for twenty years when Odysseus goes off to fight in the Trojan War after the abduction of Helen, Penelope manages, in the face of scandalous rumours, to maintain the kingdom of Ithaca, bring up her wayward son, and keep over a hundred suitors at bay. When Odysseus finally comes home after enduring hardships, overcoming monsters and sleeping with goddesses, he kills her suitors and - curiously - twelve of her maids. In a splendid contemporary twist to the ancient story, Margaret Atwood has chosen to give the telling of it to Penelope and to her twelve hanged maids, asking: 'What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to?' In Atwood's dazzling, playful retelling, the story becomes as wise and compassionate as it is haunting, and as wildly entertaining as it is disturbing. With wit and verve, drawing on the storytelling and poetic talent for which she herself is renowned, she gives Penelope new life and reality - and sets out to provide an answer to an ancient mystery.

Title: Oryx And Crake: Description:
Shortlisted for the Booker 2003. Gripping novel, at once tense and funny, about survival and truth in a devastated 'utopia'.

Title: Princess Prunella And The Purple Peanut: Description:
Princess Prunella is a pill!! When a wise woman comes to the palace to beg for food she is promptly pooh-poohed by the pompous princess. So the woman casts a strange and terrible spell - a putrod purple peanut begins to grow fromt he point of the princess's pretty nose. There is only one way to break the spell - Prunella must perform 3 good deeds. A simple task for most people but not when you are the proudest, most petulant princess on the planet...

Title: Good Bones: Description:
A collection of pieces, meditations, flights of imagination and fantasy, honing in on Shakespeare, bats, tree stumps, ecological disasters, bodies, male and female, the future theology, amongst other matters. Other work by the author includes "The Handmaids Tale" and "Wilderness Tips".

Title: Oryx And Crake: Description:
Margaret Atwood's classic novel, "The Handmaid's Tale", is about the future. Now, in "Oryx and Crake", the future has changed. It's much worse. And we're well on the road to it now. The narrator of Margaret Atwood's riveting new novel is Snowman, self-named though not self-created. As the story begins, he's sleeping in a tree, wearing a dirty old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beautiful and beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. Earlier, Snowman's life was one of comparative privilege. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Was he himself in any way responsible? Why is he now left alone with his bizarre memories - except for the more-than-perfect, green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster? He explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. With breathtaking command of her shocking material and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into a less-than-brave new world, an outlandish yet wholly believable space populated by a cast of characters who will continue to inhabit your dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.

Title: The Handmaid's Tale: Description:
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the house of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now...everything has changed. In rich, pure language, in a story so powerful it will move you to tears, Margaret Atwood has drawn a chilling portrait of a future that may not be so very far away.

Title: Wilderness Tips: Description:
A collection of short stories that aims to take readers into familiar, strange and secret places of the imagination, to reveal different textures of contemporary life and the logic of irrational behaviour.

Title: Moral Disorder: Description:
Brilliant typical Atwood. An emotional journey through lonliness, love, loss and old age.

Title: The Handmaid's Tale: Description:
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and a classic of feminist fiction. This story follows Offred, a woman living in a dystopian future USA; her sole function to provide the establishment with children.