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Margaret Atwood Message Board 1/1/2012
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Atwood has written!

Author Atwood's Book Reviews

Alias Grace (Biography)
In 1843, Grace Marks was tried for the murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear, and his mistress Nancy Montgomery. James McDermot, also a servant in the house at the time, was tried and hanged. Grace was sentanced to life in prison. Little is actually known about her life, and the two accused gave 5 different stories during the trial. Using material from the time - newspaper reports, observations, Doctor's letters etc, Margaret Atwood has pieced together ...
Alias Grace (Literature)
Grace Marks is an Irish young woman growing up in Canada. Grace survived a harrowing voyage from Ireland to Canada and she has survived extreme poverty with her inept and sometimes abusive father. She works as a maid in wealthy families, cleaning and cooking. Eventually, she comes to work for Thomas Kinnear. She is accused of murdering Kinnear and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, and is sent to the Kingston Penitentiary. Many years after her conv...
Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood's “The Blind Assassin” has recently been named this year's Booker Prize winner, and what an undertaking it is! Hailed as one of her best already, be prepared for quite a ride in this novel, which is really a novel-within-a-novel. But no matter. Both are worth your time! Complicated, yes; convoluted, yes; well-written, yes! It is told in first person by Iris, the older sister, and set in 1945. Iris has witnessed her younger sis...
Cat's Eye
Cat's eye, the ninth of Atwood's novels, is the story of Elaine Risley, a successful painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her childhood. Most of the novel flashes back to her childhood and focuses on the relationships she had, particularly the relationship between herself and a girl named Cordelia. Cordelia and the other girls teased and tortured her so much that Elaine loses all her self self-esteem and adopts bad habits, such as peeling her ...

Atwood booklist

Lady Oracle
Joan Foster is a critically acclaimed poet with a life full of secrets who fakes her own death. Joan Foster is living in a rented room in Italy after faking her death and leaving her husband in Canada. She narrates her life in flashback. She has been leading a double life, writing romance novels under a pseudonym. She has never told her husband about this, nor about most of her past, particularly that she spent her childhood and teen years overweight....
Oryx and Crake
Snowman, the last human alive, thinks back on the disaster that ended humanity. Snowman is the last human on Earth. All that remains are the genetically engineered wolvogs and pigoons that roam the forests, along with the beautiful and peaceful creatures that have come to replace mankind. Wracked with guilt and self-loathing, Snowman continually thinks back to the time before, when he was named Jimmy. Jimmy grew up in a time when genetic engineering was ...
Surfacing
In Margaret Atwood's 1972 novel, a young woman returns to the remote island in Quebec where she grew up. Her father has disappeared and she brings two friends (a married couple) and her estranged boyfriend to search for him. Over the course of a week, they search for traces of him while the narrator uncovers suppressed pieces of her past. The marriage between her friends begins to erode as their supplies dwindle and American tourists invade the pristi...
The Edible Woman
The Edible Woman is about a young marketer who identifies sex and love with food and becomes anorexic. In 1969, the sexually frustrated Marian McAlpine has a job as a market researcher in Toronto, Canada. She lives with her roommate Ainsley who succeeds in tricking her evasive boyfriend Len into thinking she is pregnant so that he will propose. After Marian accepts her own marriage proposal from her dull yet professionally polished fiancée Peter, she ge...
The Handmaid's Tale
The story is told through the eyes of a "handmaid" whose name is unknown to us, though she is refered to as "Offred" meaning Of Fred. She is part of a society called the Republic of Gilead that has taken over what would now be known as Massachussets. It is a theocratic society that has effectively removed the rights of women to the point where they have no purpose other than child rearing or in some cases house cleaning/maintenance. ...
The Robber Bride
The story starts off with Tony, Roz, and Charis meeting in a restaurant as they have been doing ever since the death of Zenia. They all went to college together and although they all have different personalities and interests, they have one thing in common: all their lives were affected by Zenia. One day, while dining at the restaurant, they spot Zenia entering . The person that they thought that had disappeared from their lives forever and th...

Margaret Atwood list of books

The Year of the Flood
The Year of the Flood is a dystopian novel that follows two main characters that are connected through a religious group called The God's Gardeners. The group anticipates the coming of a waterless-flood that is going to come and wipe out the human race so that the Earth can heal and rebuild from the destruction and unbalance that humans have caused it. This book is the second in the MaddAdam series though you do not need to read the first book (Oryx and ...