num_pages: 655
description: Winner of the Booker Prize 2000, The Blind Assassin is a spellbinding novel that spans the decades between the First World War and the present, offering the sweep of an epic and the intimate focus of a family drama.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 "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.
language: English
title: The Blind Assassin
titlecomplete: The Blind Assassin
characters: Iris Chase, Winifred Prior, Reenie, Richard Griffen, Norval Chase, Myra Sturgess, Laura Chase, Alex Thomas
genres: Fiction, Historical, Science Fiction, Mystery, Canada, Literature, Classics, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 152896
places: Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Port Ticonderoga, Canada
awards: awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Booker Prize, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Shortlist, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Hammett Prize, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Puddly Award
category: New Novel, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Dublin Literary Award
category: Shortlist
publisher: Seal Books