A Complete List of Atwood Fiction
This year the spotlight remains firmly on Margaret Atwood: we wait with bated breath for the release of The Testaments, The Handmaid’s Tale sequel and are delighted that she was inducted into the Order of the Companions of Honour as part of the New Year’s honours. A true force in the world of fiction Margaret Atwood has published sixteen novels, eight short story collections since 1969 when her first novel, The Edible Woman, was published.
How many have you read?
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments and Alias Grace
'Clara', she said, 'do you think I'm normal?'
'I'd say you're almost abnormally normal, if you know what I mean.'
Marian is determinedly ordinary, waiting to get married. She likes her work, her broody flatmate and her sober fiancé Peter. All goes well at first, but Marian has reckoned without an inner self that wants something more, that calmly sabotages her careful plans, her stable routine - and her digestion. Marriage à la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can't stomach . . .
Margaret Atwood's first novel is both a scathingly funny satire of consumerism and a heady exploration of emotional cannibalism.
'Atwood has the magic of turning the particular and the parochial into the universal' The Times
'Written with a brilliant angry energy' Observer
'Margaret Atwood not only has a sense of humour, she has wit and style in abundance . . . a joy to read' Good Housekeeping
'A witty, elegant, generous and patient writer' Punch
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments and Alias Grace
'One of the most important novels of the 20th century . . . utterly remarkable' New York Times
'I feel it will be different if I look myself. Probably when we get there my father will have returned from wherever he has been, he will be sitting in the cabin waiting for us.'
A young woman returns to northern Quebec, to the remote island of her childhood, with her lover and her two friends to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her father. Flooded with memories, she begins to realise that going home means entering not only another place but another time. As the wild island exerts its elemental hold and she is submerged in the language of the wilderness, she sees that what she is really looking for is her own past.
'A stunning and satisfying book' Time Out
'Utterly absorbing' Sunday Times
'Atwood has undertaken a serious and complex task. . . . She shows the depths that must be explored if one attempts to live an examined life' New York Times Book Review
'Margaret Atwood is one of the most intelligent and talented writers to set herself the task of deciphering life in the late twentieth century' Vogue
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace
*
The trick was to disappear without a trace, leaving behind me the shadow of a corpse, a shadow everyone would mistake for solid reality. At first I thought I'd managed it.
Fat girl, thin girl. Red hair, brown hair. Polish aristocrat, radical husband. Joan Foster has dozens of different identities, and she's utterly confused by them all. After a life spent running away from difficult situations, she decides to escape to a hill town in Italy to take stock of her life.
But first she must carefully arrange her own death.
*
'A mistress of controlled hysteria' - Time
'If you feel safe only with "nine to five" reality, you'll probably not enjoy her books. But if you'd like to lift off, try her' - Cosmopolitan
Dancing Girls (1977)
Life Before Man (1979)
Bodily Harm (1981)
By the author of THE HANDMAID'S TALE and ALIAS GRACE
A beautifully bizarre assortment of short stories and prose poems. Writing on an eclectic range of subjects from 'Bread' and 'Strawberries', to 'Fainting' and 'Women's Novels', Margaret Atwood brings her astonishing world view to the comings and goings of ordinary life. The pretentious male chef is taken down a peg, a gang of cynical five year olds concoct a poisonous brew; and knowing when to stop is of deadly importance in a game of Murder in the Dark.
*
Praise for Murder in the Dark:
These vignettes glow with the usual Atwood magic of intelligence ... an exhilarating performance, full of sharp pleasures for the mind -BRITISH BOOK NEWS
'A brilliant and witty writer' -COSMOPOLITAN
'Direct, unpretentious, humorous' -SUNDAY TIMES
Bluebeard’s Egg (1983)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments
A leathery bog-man transforms an old love affair; a sweet, gruesome gift is sent by the wife of an ex-lover; landscape paintings are haunted by the ghost of a young girl. This dazzling collection of ten short stories takes us into familiar Atwood territory to reveal the logic of irrational behaviour and the many textures lying beneath ordinary life.
'Atwood is a writer of importance, with a deep understanding of human behaviour, a beautiful understated style and, rarest of all, a broad scope' Marilyn French
'Funny, sharp and always incisive' Time Out
'Everything Atwood forms in words has substance and weight' Daily Telegraph
'Margaret Atwood deserves an adjective - Atwoodian - in recognition of her virtuoso wit and unmistakable style' Chicago Tribune
A treasure trove of collected works from the legendary author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace
Queen Gertrude gives Hamlet a piece of her mind.
An ugly sister and a wicked stepmother put in a good word for themselves.
A reincarnated bat explains how Bram Stoker got Dracula hopelessly wrong.
Bones and Murder is a bewitching cocktail of prose and poetry, fiction and fairytales, as well as some of Atwood's own illustrations. It's pure distilled Atwood: deliciously strong and bittersweet.
'A marvellous miniature sample case of Atwood's sensuous and sardonic talents' Times Literary Supplement
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...
Bones & Murder (1995)
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale
Now a major NETFLIX series
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' Julie Myerson, Independent on Sunday
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace
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.
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 Planet Zycron. As the invented story twists through love and sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one; while 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.
By the author of THE HANDMAID'S TALE and ALIAS GRACE
*
Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, now calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility.
*
Praise for Oryx and Crake:
'In Jimmy, Atwood has created a great character: a tragic-comic artist of the future, part buffoon, part Orpheus. An adman who's a sad man; a jealous lover who's in perpetual mourning; a fantasist who can only remember the past' -INDEPENDENT
'Gripping and remarkably imagined' -LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Penelopiad (2005)
The Tent (2006)
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace
This collection of short stories follows a woman at different points in her life, from the loneliness of childhood, the ardour and confusion of young adulthood, and the mortality we must all eventually face up to. Moral Disorder is Margaret Atwood at her very finest.
Praise for Moral Disorder:
'Atwood entices us to flip through the photo album of a Canadian woman who closely resembles herself. Come here, sit beside me, she seems to say. Then she takes us on an emotional journey through loneliness, love, loss and old age' Sarah Emily Miano, The Times
'Atwood makes it look so easy, doing what she does best: tenderly dissecting the human heart . . . A marvellous writer' Lee Langley, Daily Mail
'A model of distillation, precision, clarity and detail . . . Atwood writes with compassion and intensity not only about her characters but also about the 20th century itself' Mary Flanagan, Independent
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace
The sun brightens in the east, reddening the blue-grey haze that marks the distant ocean. The vultures roosting on the hydro poles fan out their wings to dry them. the air smells faintly of burning. The waterless flood - a man-made plague - has ended the world.
But two young women have survived: Ren, a young dancer trapped where she worked, in an upmarket sex club (the cleanest dirty girls in town); and Toby, who watches and waits from her rooftop garden. Is anyone else out there?
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace
Toby, a survivor of the man-made plague that has swept the earth, is telling stories.
Stories left over from the old world, and stories that will determine a new one.
Listening hard is young Blackbeard, one of the innocent Crakers, the species designed to replace humanity. Their reluctant prophet, Jimmy-the-Snowman, is in a coma, so they've chosen a new hero - Zeb, the street-smart man Toby loves. As clever Pigoons attack their fragile garden and malevolent Painballers scheme, the small band of survivors will need more than stories.
BY THE AUTHOR OF THE HANDMAID'S TALE, THE TESTAMENTS AND ALIAS GRACE
'Dark and witty tales from the gleefully inventive Margaret Atwood. Witty verve, imaginative inventiveness and verbal sizzle vivify every page' Sunday Times
A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire, and a crime committed long ago is revenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite.
'A collection of nine acerbic, mischievous, gulpable short stories' Harper's Bazaar
'Atwood's prose is so sharp and sly that the effect is bracing rather than bleak' Guardian
'[Look at these tales] as eight icily refreshing arsenic Popsicles followed by a baked Alaska laced with anthrax, all served with impeccable style and aplomb. Enjoy!' Ursula K. Le Guin, Financial Times
'Atwood has characters here close to death, dead already, unwittingly doomed or - in one memorable case - freeze-dried; but her own curiosity, enthusiasm and sheer storytelling panache remain alive and kicking' Independent
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments
Charmaine sees an advertisement for a project called Positron that promises you a job, a place to live, a bed to sleep in - imagine how appealing that would be if you were working in a dive bar and living in your car. She and her husband, Stan, apply at once.
The only catch is that once you're in there, you can't get out.
No one writes the lust and the loves, the wickedness and the weakness of the human heart like the splendid Margaret Atwood.
'Margaret Atwood [is] a living legend' New York Times Book Review
'Gloriously madcap . . . You only pause in your laughter when you realise that, in its constituent parts, the world she depicts here is all too horribly plausible' Stephanie Merritt, Observer
'Her eye for the most unpredictable caprices of the human heart and her narrative fearlessness have made her one of the world's most celebrated novelists' Naomi Alderman, Guardian
'The bestselling author who shot to fame thirty years ago with The Handmaid's Tale is still at her darkly comic best' Sunday Times
Hag-Seed (2016)
The Testaments (2019)
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