The Blind Assassin

Written by Margaret Atwood

Narrated by Lorelei King

Available for the first time as a downloadable audio file.

‘Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.’ Thus begins The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood’s new 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 bewailing her unreliable body and deriding those who try to help her, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life and her perilous times, but in particular on the events surrounding her sister’s tragic early death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase a dollop of notoriety as well as a cult following: as Iris says, she herself lives ‘in the long shadow cast by Laura’. Sexually explicit for its time and place, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a left-leaning man on the run.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 15, 2005
• ISBN: 9780007218448

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in over thirty-five countries, is the award-winning author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid's Tale, which was made into a TV series, her novels include Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, and The Robber Bride. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once for The Blind Assassin. She lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

Reviews for The Blind Assassin

[Tina O'Regan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyed but feel that it was a very quick read due to the fact it was heavily abridged

[Lucia Garcia · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The relationship between the sisters is truly interesting and ultimately relatable. Although ait is a sad story, with almost everybody heartbroken, Atwood manages to leave me at peace at the end of the book.

[Deepannita · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The story is great but the narrator is really awesome .

[Suswati Basu · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Once again, literary maestro Margaret Atwood has produced another creative mega-feat. Her novel in a novel reminds me of her other work Hagseed, also exploring the theme of revenge.

However, there is very little to laugh about in this story in which narrator Iris, at the end of her life, describes the mysterious circumstances that her sister, husband and lover all died in. Younger sibling Laura is said to have been killed after her car edged off a cliff, all the while leaving the world with a controversial novel that describes a racy affair.

Iris reveals the truth about the incidents from her perspective, which means we always see Laura as child-like and naive, while her husband Richard and his sister Winifred are portrayed as cardboard villains. With that in mind, Atwood's characters are realistic because they are all just points of view from one person. Great twists in this book.