Category: | Book |
By (author): | Atwood, Margaret |
Subject: | FICTION / Canadian |
FICTION / Historical | |
FICTION / Literary | |
Publisher: | McClelland & Stewart |
Published: | September 2011 |
Format: | Book-paperback |
Pages: | 656 |
Size: | 8.00in x 5.18in x 1.75in |
From The Publisher* | Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. These words are spoken by Iris Chase Griffen, married at eighteen to a wealthy industrialist but now poor and eighty-two. Iris recalls her far from exemplary life, and the events leading up to her sister's death, gradually revealing the carefully guarded Chase family secrets. Among these is "The Blind Assassin," a novel that earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following. Sexually explicit for its time, it was a pulp fantasy improvised by two unnamed lovers who meet secretly in rented rooms and seedy cafés. As this novel-within-a-novel twists and turns through love and jealousy, self-sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real narrative, as both move closer to war and catastrophe. Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize-winning sensation combines elements of gothic drama, romantic suspense, and science fiction fantasy in a spellbinding tale. From the Hardcover edition. |
Review Quote* | "Brilliant.... Opulent.... Atwood is a poet...as well as a contriver of fiction, and scarcely a sentence of her quick, dry yet avid prose fails to do useful work, adding to a picture that becomes enormous." John Updike, The New Yorker "The kind of story so full of intrigue and desperation that you take it to bed with you simply because you can't bear to put it down.... It's one thing to write an accomplished novel; it's another entirely to spin a tale so brilliantly that the reader internalizes it." Harper's Bazaar "Absorbing.... Expertly rendered.... Virtuosic storytelling is on display." The New York Times |
Biographical Note | Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty volumes of poetry, children's literature, fiction, and non-fiction, but is best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1969), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. A book of short stories called Stone Mattress: Nine Tales was published in 2014. Her novel, MaddAddam (2013), is the final volume in a three-book series that began with the Man-Booker prize-nominated Oryx and Crake (2003) and continued with The Year of the Flood (2009). The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short fiction) both appeared in 2006. A volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, a collection of non-fiction essays appeared in 2011. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth was adapted for the screen in 2012. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. |