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Read by Margaret Dionne
10 cassettes, 17 hours

Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights in a dazzling new novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist.

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.

The Blind Assassin proves once again that Atwood is one of the most talented, daring, and exciting writers of our time. Like The Handmaid's Tale, it is destined to become a classic.

"The novel is largely unencumbered by the feminist ideology that weighed down such earlier Atwood novels as THE EDIBLE WOMAN and THE HANDMAID'S TALE, and for the most part it is also shorn of those books' satiric social vision. In fact, of all the author's books to date, THE BLIND ASSASSIN is most purely a work of entertainment--an expertly rendered Daphne du Maurieresque tale that showcases Ms. Atwood's narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic."

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, 09/08/2000

"If we apply the old Forsterian standard that round characters are ones 'capable of surprising in a convincing way,' Atwood's new novel, for all its multilayered story-within-a-story-within-a-story construction, must be judged flat as a pancake. In THE BLIND ASSASSIN, overlong and badly written, our first impressions of the dramatis personae prove not so much lasting as total....[T]he two parts of Atwood's big new book feel like separate projects that have been soldered together rather than thematically connected. Worse still, nothing in either part gives a reader much desire to forge connections through inference."

Thomas Mallon, New York Times Book Review, 09/03/2000

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