The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Iris Chase Griffen is nearing the end of her life and is determined to set down her version of the stories and scandals that have long swirled around her and her family. In a narrative that spans the twentieth century, Iris describes a childhood of wealth and privilege darkened by her mother’s early death and her father’s alcoholism and ultimately destroyed when the economic and political turmoil of the Depression forces her father to close the family’s once-thriving factories. She tells of her marriage to Richard Griffen, a greedy, ambitious industrialist whose promise to save Iris and her young, vulnerable sister, Laura, turns out to be a snare of lies and treachery; and of her decision, spurred by grief and guilt after Laura’s suicide, to publish a manuscript that catapults Laura to posthumous fame and condemns Iris to a life of lonely isolation.

Alternating with Iris’s reminiscences and wry commentary on her current situation are passages from Laura’s scandalous novel, The Blind Assassin, about an upper-class married woman and her lover, a hack writer and a political radical, who spins a science fiction tale (also entitled The Blind Assassin) during their clandestine meetings. Newspaper reports on events in the characters’ personal lives–from Norval Chase’s desperately hopeful speech at the last company picnic to Iris’s posh wedding to Richard Griffen’s mysterious death–as well as accounts of actual historical events add yet another dimension to the novel, coloring, deepening, and sometimes contradicting the readers’ perceptions.

With breathtaking grace and authority, Atwood moves from richly detailed, multigenerational family saga to pitch-perfect, ’30s-style science fiction to bittersweet memoir. The result is a work of extraordinary power, an exploration not only of imagined lives past, present, and future, but of the art and artifice of storytelling itself. Intricately constructed, The Blind Assassin crosses boundaries of genre and style in a tour de force of creative daring.