Margaret Atwood at 80: A retrospective on her life and career.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. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. 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. 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. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "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. Winner of the 2000 Man Booker Prize, 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.
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