The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” Iris Chase & her sister Laura grow up well-off but motherless in a small town in southern Ontario. Iris Chase Griffen,married at eighteen to a wealthy industrialist but now poor,at eighty-two, recalls her far from exemplary life&the events leading up to her sister’s death,gradually revealing carefully guarded Chase family secrets. Among those a novel that earned her dead sister not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following. Sexually explicit for its time,The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman&a man on the run. During their secret meetings in rented rooms,the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on a distant planet. As the invented story twists through love,sacrifice&betrayal,so does the real one;while events in both move closer to war&catastrophe. Outrageous,formidable,compelling&funny,this is a novel filled with deep humour&dark drama that comes together in a brilliant & astonishing final twist. The story is a novel within a novel,the Blind Assassin,a roman à clef attributed to Laura but published by Iris.It is about Alex Thomas,a politically radical author of pulp science fiction who has an ambiguous relationship with the sisters.That embedded story itself contains a third tale,a science fiction story told by Alex's fictional counterpart to the second novel's protagonist,believed to be Laura's fictional counterpart. First printing