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The Blind Assassin

By Margaret Atwood

(194)

| Paperback | 9781860498800

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Book Description

Winner of the Booker Prize 2000, The Blind Assassin is a spellbinding novel that spans the decades between the First World War and the present, offering the sweep of an epic and the intimate focus of a family drama.

For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of sContinue

Winner of the Booker Prize 2000, The Blind Assassin is a spellbinding novel that spans the decades between the First World War and the present, offering the sweep of an epic and the intimate focus of a family drama.

For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious.

The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a- novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.

Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together, readers will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be—but, in fact, much more.

Critics

  • Where women grow on trees

    The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood Bloomsbury £16.99, pp525 Buy it at BOL Margaret Atwood new novel is made up of three strands. There are the memoirs of Iris Chase, tracing her progress from prosperous beginnings, daughter of a button factory owner, ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • Mirror writing

    Plenty of novels feature novelists, but few give even a line of the novels that the characters are supposed to have written. A recent example is Reta Winters, narrator of Carol Shields's Unless. Further back, there is Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator o ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

15 Reviews

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  • 3 people find this helpful

    Great, great book, wonderfully written. The irony, the derisory detachment of the old Iris are invaluable! Not to mention the all those hunting ghosts and the disturbing presence of Laura as a child that pervade the book, in spite of her growing up...

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    sexy said on Dec 2, 2008 | Add your feedback

  • 1 person find this helpful

    A book within a book within a book. Meta-fiction, dazzling in its accuracy.

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    Sengaia said on Apr 27, 2009 | Add your feedback

  • 1 person find this helpful

    I hadn't read anything by Margaret Atwood in awhile - I enjoyed it. I like books that take a few chapters to figure out exactly what is going on.

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    secretninjakt said on Aug 31, 2007 | 1 feedback

  • A Masterpiece

    One of the most cleverly-written, imaginative and enthralling books I've ever read.
    The second I finished reading it, I went back to page one and started again: Margaret Atwood is a pleasure to read, not only for the spellbinding inventiveness of the plot, but also for the sheer beauty of her prose ... (continue)

    One of the most cleverly-written, imaginative and enthralling books I've ever read.
    The second I finished reading it, I went back to page one and started again: Margaret Atwood is a pleasure to read, not only for the spellbinding inventiveness of the plot, but also for the sheer beauty of her prose.
    A must read for anyone.

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    Marta said on Jul 25, 2011 | 1 feedback

  • Poetic lyricism

    Atwood's language is delicate and beautiful but can be tedious at times.

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    Ines Lin said on Feb 27, 2011 | Add your feedback

  • My favorite Atwood: fast paced, full of mysteries that are slowly revealed forming a perfect canvas, passionate, and quite gut-wrenching. Recommended.

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    ilariainthelibrary said on Jun 7, 2010 | Add your feedback

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