Most Popular Books by Margaret Atwood

Marian has a problem. A willing member of the consumer society in which she lives, she suddenly finds herself identifying with the things being consumed. She can cope with her tidy-minded fiancé, Peter, who likes shooting rabbits. She can cope with her job in market research, and the antics of her roommate. She can even cope with Duncan, a graduate student who seems to prefer laundromats to women. But not being able to eat is a different matter. Steak was the first to go. Then lamb, pork, and the rest. Next came her incapacity to face an egg. Vegetables were the final straw. But Marian has her reasons, and what happens next provides an unusual solution. Witty, subversive, hilarious, The Edible Woman is dazzling and utterly original. It is Margaret Atwood’s brilliant first novel, and the book that introduced her as a consummate observer of the ironies and absurdities of modern life.

From the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale—now an Emmy Award-winning Hulu original series—and Alias Grace, now a Netflix original series. 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.

An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate “Handmaids” under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred’s persistent memories of life in the “time before” and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.

The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid’s Tale “brings a swift, powerful energy” to this “intimate and immediate” poetry collection (Publishers Weekly). These beautifully crafted poems, by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate, are some of Margaret Atwood’s most accomplished and versatile works. Some draw on history and some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.

The bestselling author of The Handmaid''s Tale and The Testaments reveals the life of one of the most notorious women of the nineteenth century in this "shadowy, fascinating novel" (Time). • A Netflix original miniseries. It''s 1843, and Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders. An up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Captivating and disturbing, Alias Grace showcases bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood at the peak of her powers.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES AND WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD How does the greatest writer of our time tell her own story? Raised by scientifically minded parents, Margaret Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forests of northern Quebec, where her entomologist father and independent, resourceful mother created an unfettered and nomadic childhood, sometimes isolated but also thrilling and beautiful. From this unconventional start, Margaret unfolds the story of her life, linking key moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel school year that would inspire Cat’s Eye to the unease of 1980s Berlin, where she began The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages alive with the natural world, reading and books, major political turning points, and her lifelong love for the charismatic writer Graeme Gibson, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood stars, and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel. As she explores her past, Margaret reveals more and more about her writing, the connections between real life and art—and the workings of one of our very greatest imaginations.

The appearance of Margaret Atwood''s first major collection of poetry marked the beginning of a truly outstanding career in Canadian and international letters. The voice in these poems is as witty, vulnerable, direct, and incisive as we''ve come to know in later works, such as Power Politics, Bodily Harm, and Alias Grace. Atwood writes compassionately about the risks of love in a technological age, and the quest for identity in a universe that cannot quite be trusted. Containing many of Atwood''s best and most famous poems, The Circle Game won the 1966 Governor General''s Award for Poetry and rapidly attained an international reputation as a classic of modern poetry. This beautiful new edition of The Circle Game contains the complete collection, with an introduction by Sherrill E. Grace of the University of British Columbia.

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” These words are spoken by Iris Chase Griffen, married at eighteen to a wealthy industrialist but now poor and eighty-two. Iris recalls her far from exemplary life, and the events leading up to her sister’s death, gradually revealing the carefully guarded Chase family secrets. Among these is “The Blind Assassin,” a novel that earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following. Sexually explicit for its time, it was a pulp fantasy improvised by two unnamed lovers who meet secretly in rented rooms and seedy cafés. As this novel-within-a-novel twists and turns through love and jealousy, self-sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real narrative, as both move closer to war and catastrophe. Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning sensation combines elements of gothic drama, romantic suspense, and science fiction fantasy in a spellbinding tale.

Dancing Girls is Margaret Atwood’s highly praised first collection of short fiction. In it she explores the dark intricacies of the mind, the complexities of human relationships, and the clashes between cultures. In the stories, the mundane and the bizarre intersect in unexpected ways: ex-wives indulge in an odd feast at a psychiatrist’s funeral; a young student is pursued by an obsessed immigrant; an old woman stores up supplies against an impending cataclysm. The fourteen stories range in setting from Canada to England, from Mexico to the United States, and portray characters who touch us and arouse in us compassion and understanding. In this astonishing collection, Margaret Atwood maps human motivation we scarcely know we have.

A breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her life—from the bestselling author of The Handmaid''s Tale and The Testaments Disturbing, humorous, and compassionate, Cat’s Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman—but above all she must seek release form her haunting memories.

In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood describes how she came to write her utopian, dystopian works. The word “utopia” comes from Thomas More’s book of the same name—meaning “no place” or “good place,” or both. In “Dire Cartographies,” from the essay collection In Other Worlds, Atwood coins the term “ustopia,” which combines utopia and dystopia, the imagined perfect society and its opposite. Each contains latent versions of the other. Following her intellectual journey and growing familiarity with ustopias fictional and real, from Atlantis to Avatar and Beowulf to Berlin in 1984 (and 1984), Atwood explains how years after abandoning a PhD thesis with chapters on good and bad societies, she produced novel-length dystopias and ustopias of her own. “My rules for The Handmaid’s Tale were simple,” Atwood writes. “I would not put into this book anything that humankind had not already done, somewhere, sometime, or for which it did not already have the tools.” With great wit and erudition, Atwood reveals the history behind her beloved creations.

From the bestselling author of The Handmaid''s Tale and The Testaments • This brilliant collection of connected short stories strings together several decades of moments in the life of one woman—as an ambitious girl in the 1930s, as a young professional coming of age in the uncertain ‘50s and ‘60s, and as half of a couple growing old together. In a series of vividly evoked settings that span cities, backwoods, and farm country, we see this woman contending over time with an unstable sister, a married lover, aging parents, mystifying stepchildren, vulnerable farm animals, and her own changing self. By turns funny, lyrical, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Margaret Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The first volume in the internationally acclaimed MaddAddam trilogy is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future—from the bestselling author of The Handmaid''s Tale and The Testaments A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey—with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake—through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments—the second book of the internationally celebrated MaddAddam trilogy, set in the visionary world of Oryx and Crake, is at once a moving tale of lasting friendship and a landmark work of speculative fiction The waterless flood long predicted by Adam One, the kindly leader of God’s Gardeners—a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion—has occurred, altering Earth as we know it and obliterating most human life. Among the survivors are Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails; and Toby, a member of God’s Gardeners, who is barricaded inside a luxurious spa. But they cannot stay locked away for ever. Amid shadowy, corrupt ruling powers and new, gene-spliced life forms, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move.

From the bestselling author of The Handmaid''s Tale and The Testaments—one of Margaret Atwood’s most unforgettable characters lurks at the center of this intricate novel like a spider in a web. The glamorous, irresistible, unscrupulous Zenia is nothing less than a fairy-tale villain in the memories of her former friends. Roz, Charis, and Tony—university classmates decades ago—were reunited at Zenia’s funeral and have met monthly for lunch ever since, obsessively retracing the destructive swath she once cut through their lives. A brilliantly inventive fabulist, Zenia had a talent for exploiting her friends’ weaknesses, wielding intimacy as a weapon and cheating them of money, time, sympathy, and men. But one day, five years after her funeral, they are shocked to catch sight of Zenia: even her death appears to have been yet another fiction. As the three women plot to confront their larger-than-life nemesis, Atwood proves herself a gleefully acute observer of the treacherous shoals of friendship, trust, desire, and power.

An original and compelling work in which Margaret Atwood passes one woman’s bizarre life through the prism of her unique literary vision. The shy, awkward wife of a perpetual radical, Joan Foster is a formerly obese woman whose delicate equilibrium is threatened by the fact that the several lives she has lived separately and secretly are coming together and will be exposed. She is newly and notoriously famous as a bestselling author; she writes gothic novels under a nom de plume; she is having a hidden affair. Love, fear, understanding, suspense, sensuality, and humour—there is hardly an emotional current that is not touched in Lady Oracle, and with a depth, vitality, and wit that are rare in any time.

A new collection of dazzling short fiction. One of the world’s most celebrated authors, Margaret Atwood has penned a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays, in the genre of her popular books Good Bones and Murder in the Dark, punctuated with wonderful illustrations by the author. Chilling and witty, prescient and personal, delectable and tart, these highly imaginative, vintage Atwoodian essays speak on a broad range of subjects, reflecting the times we live in with deadly accuracy and knife-edge precision.

The bestselling author of The Handmaid''s Tale and The Testaments "uses her powerful gifts of language and observation to delineate both the misunderstandings between men and women and the everyday sadnesses and comforts of love” (The New York Times). In each of these stories Atwood deftly illuminates the shape of a whole life: in a few brief pages we watch as characters progress from the vulnerabilities of adolescence through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age. The past resurfaces in the present in ways both subtle and dramatic: the body of a lost Arctic explorer emerges from the ice, a 2,000-year-old bog man turns up in an archeological dig, a man with dark secrets marries his lover’s sister, a girl who disappears on a canoe trip haunts her friend many decades later. The richly layered stories in Wilderness Tips map interior landscapes shaped by time, regret, and lost chances, endowing even the most unassuming of lives with a disquieting intensity.

A marvelous collection of wide-ranging essays from the bestselling author of The Handmaid''s Tale and The Testaments, exploring her lifelong relationship to science fiction—as a reader and as a writer The ebook edition of this title contains over thirty additional, illuminating ebook-exclusive illustrations by the author At a time when the borders between genres are increasingly porous, she maps the fertile crosscurrents of speculative and science fiction, utopias, dystopias, slipstream, and fantasy, musing on the age-old human impulse to imagine new worlds. She shares the evolution of her personal fascination with SF, from her childhood invention of a race of flying superhero rabbits to her graduate study of its Victorian antecedents to the creation of her own acclaimed novels. Studded with appreciations of such influential writers as Marge Piercy, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kazuo Ishiguro, H. Rider Haggard, Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, and Jonathan Swift, In Other Worlds is as humorous and charming as it is insightful and provocative.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE • A gripping return to Gilead, The Testaments exposes the regime’s inner decay through the intersecting stories of three women whose choices could ignite its downfall. Coming soon as a Hulu Original series starring Ann Dowd, reprising her role as Aunt Lydia, Chase Infiniti as Agnes, and Lucy Halliday as Daisy. The Testaments can be read on its own or as a sequel to Margaret Atwood’s classic, The Handmaid’s Tale. More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid''s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three women converge, with potentially explosive results. Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by that of Aunt Lydia, whose complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways. With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is and how far she will go for what she believes.