Blind Assassin

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. Thus begins The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize-winning novel. Laura Chase's older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent Industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following: as Iris says, she herself lives 'in the long shadow cast by Laura'. Sexually explicit for its time, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a man on the run. During their secret meetings in rented rooms, the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on the Planet Zycron. As the invented story twists through love and sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one, as events in both move closer to war and catastrophe. By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama. It is Margaret Atwood at her breathtaking best.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. In addition to the classic The Handmaid's Tale, her novels include Cat's Eye, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, and Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. Her latest novel, The Year of the Flood, is published by Bloomsbury in September 2009. She was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 2008. Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto, Canada.