Life Before Man - Softcover

Atwood, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385491107 ISBN 13: 9780385491105

Publisher: Anchor, 1998

Synopsis

A particularly complicated love triangle sets this poetic novel in motion—from the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

Elizabeth and Nate, though habitually unfaithful to each other, have remained married for more than a decade. But after Elizabeth’s latest lover commits suicide, she emerges from her grief to find that her gentle, indecisive husband is on the verge of leaving her. He has become enamored of Lesje, a young paleontologist and perennial innocent who seems to prefers dinosaur fossils to humans. Elizabeth sets her sights on Lesje’s live-in boyfriend, William, and the ensuing emotional maelstrom threatens to upend all of their lives. Blending painful honesty with cutting satire, Margaret Atwood give us characters whose haunting dilemmas linger long after the final page.

About this title

About the Author

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade.
 
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

From the Back Cover

Imprisoned by walls of their own construction, here are three people, each in midlife, in midcrisis, forced to make choices--after the rules have changed. Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality, her suppressed rage, is married to the wrong man. She has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men. Hanging over them all is the ghost of Elizabeth's dead lover...and the dizzying threat of three lives careening inevitably toward the same climax.

Edition details

• Publisher: Anchor
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385491107
• ISBN 13: 9780385491105
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384