Celebrating Forty Years of Margaret Atwood

By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace

Elaine Risley, a painter, returns to Toronto to find herself overwhelmed by her past. Memories of childhood - unbearable betrayals and cruelties - surface relentlessly, forcing her to confront the spectre of Cordelia, once her best friend and tormentor, who has haunted her for forty years.

'Not since Graham Greene has a novelist captured so forcefully the relationship between school bully and victim...Atwood's games are played, exquisitely, by little girls' LISTENER
An exceptional novel from the winner of the 2000 Booker Prize

By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace

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 sure Tony, Roz andd Charis are there for the funeral. But five years on, as the three women share an indulgent, sisterly lunch, the unthinkable happens; 'with waves of ill will flowing out of her like cosmic radiation', Zenia is back...

BY THE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor. Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim? Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created an extraordinarily potent tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery.

'Brilliant . . . Atwood's prose is searching. So intimate it seems to be written on the skin' HILARY MANTEL

'The outstanding novelist of our age' SUNDAY TIMES

'A sensuous, perplexing book, at once sinister and dignified, grubby and gorgeous, panoramic yet specific . . . I don't think I have ever been so thrilled' INDEPENDENT

BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE HANDMAID'S TALE AND THE TESTAMENTS
WINNER OF THE 2000 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

'Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge'

Decades after Laura's mysterious demise, her 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 story are chapters from the scandalous novel that made Laura famous, in which two unnamed lovers meet secretly in rented rooms and seedy cafés, themselves writing a pulp fantasy novel of a blind killer on a distant planet.

As these stories-within-stories twist and turn through love and jealousy, self-sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real narrative, as all move closer to catastrophe in a brilliant and astonishing final twist. By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama.