The Blind Assassin - by Margaret Atwood (Paperback)

About the Book

Now in paperback, the Booker Prize-winning sensation combines gothic drama, romantic suspense, and a science fiction yarn in an entrancing novel of uncommon intricacy and grace. "A killer novel".--"The Christian Science Monitor". Author lectures.

Book Synopsis

The bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments weaves together strands of gothic suspense, romance, and science fiction into one utterly spellbinding narrative, beginning with the mysterious death of a young woman named Laura Chase in 1945.

Decades later, Laura's sister Iris recounts her memories of their childhood, and of the dramatic deaths that have punctuated their wealthy, eccentric family's history. Intertwined with Iris's account are chapters from the scandalous novel that made Laura famous, in which two illicit lovers amuse each other by spinning a tale of a blind killer on a distant planet.

These richly layered stories-within-stories gradually illuminate the secrets that have long haunted the Chase family, coming together in a brilliant and astonishing final twist.

Review Quotes

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER - A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME - ONE OF THE ATLANTIC'S 15 BOOKS YOU WON'T REGRET RE-READING

"The first great novel of the new millennium." --Newsday

"Absorbing... expertly rendered... Virtuosic storytelling [is] on display." --The New York Times

"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

"Chilling... Lyrical... [Atwood's] most ambitious work to date." --The Boston Globe

"Hauntingly powerful.... A novel of luminous prose, scalpel-precise insights and fierce characters... Atwood's new work is so assured, so elegant and so incandescently intelligent, she casts her contemporaries in the shade." --The Atlanta Journal--Constitution

"Grand storytelling on a grand scale... Sheerly enjoyable." --The Washington Post Book World

"Bewitching... A killer novel.... Atwood's crisp wit and steely realism are reminiscent of Edith Wharton... A wonderfully complex narrative." --The Christian Science Monitor

"A tour de force." --Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade.

Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.