The Blind Assassin

By: Margaret Atwood

Narrated by: Lorelei King

Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 2000

For the past 25 years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishment as never before, creating a novel that is both entertaining and profoundly serious.

The novel opens with these simple resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as you expect 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 you 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 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, you will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be - but is, in fact, much more.

©2000 O.W. Toad, Ltd (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.

Critic reviews

Book Sense Book of the Year Award Finalist, Adult Fiction, 2001

"Listeners will find themselves piecing together the clues, guessing at truths, but the rewards are to be found in the layering of details and the skill of the storytelling." (AudioFile)

Slurpy Narrator Distracts from Otherwise Excellent Storybat

This story within a story within a story is tantalizingly teased out in startling prose. Atwood is not a master, she is THE master. Unfortunately, the narrator has a painfully annoying slurping habit (she sucks in loudly to take a breath in a manner that leaves you with the feeling she has the microphone lodged inside her mouth— it made me want to throw my phone in the river) her voice is nice, although her “character” voices are a bit affectatious: deep voices for men, high pitched one for young girls, hard to take seriously—she did well with the “plain folk” accents for Reenie and Myra though). Also I’m pretty sure she mispronounced Spadina.