The Blind Assassin

First published in 2000, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a richly layered novel of family secrets, political upheaval and the stories people tell to survive their own histories. Looking back on a century of private and public betrayals, elderly Iris Chase Griffen recalls her privileged upbringing in Ontario, her complicated relationship with her sister Laura, and her marriage to the wealthy Richard Griffen. Interwoven with Iris’s memoir is a novel-within-the-novel, also called The Blind Assassin, whose illicit lovers and imagined world gradually illuminate the darker realities of the Chase family.

Moving between the 1930s, the Second World War and the end of the twentieth century, Atwood examines the silences imposed on women, the distortions of memory and the uneasy relationship between truth and invention. Newspaper clippings, retrospective narration and nested fiction combine to create a narrative in which every revelation alters the meaning of what came before. Winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, the novel is among Atwood’s most formally ambitious works, bringing together the historical sweep of Alias Grace and the speculative imagination of The Handmaid’s Tale.

From the book

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

On The Blind Assassin

“Boldly imagined and brilliantly executed.”

— Kirkus Reviews