The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [1]
—The Christian Science Monitor
“With [The Blind Assassin], Ms. Atwood offers added certification to her lofty position in world literature. . . . [It] is marked by lyrical writing and the intricacy of the narrative. The reader is repeatedly caught by surprise. . . . Almost to the last page, the book retains its sense of mystery.”
—Mel Gussow, The New York Times
“Chilling.... Lyrical.... [Atwood’s] most ambitious work to date.”
—The Boston Globe
“Hauntingly powerful. . . . Margaret Atwood is one of the greatest writers alive. . . . [Her] style is tight, authoritative and as glittering and hard as a diamond. . . . The Blind Assassin is a novel of luminous prose, scalpel-precise insights and fierce characters.... Atwood’s new work is so assured, so elegant and so incandescently intelligent, she casts her contemporaries in the shade.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Expansive. . . . A tour de force.... [The Blind Assassin] is in the best tradition of gothic melodrama.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Ingenious.... Atwood performs a spectacular sleight of hand, fashioning a bewitching, brilliantly layered story of how people see only what they wish to.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“You won’t be able to put it down.” —New York Post
“Brilliant. . . . Bountiful. . . . Meticulously furnished with the clothing, cuisine and locutions of the period.... Capacious, audacious.”
—San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
“Vintage Atwood—furious, funny, brilliant and subversive. . . . Atwood achieves an almost impossible combination—a hall of mirrors, with cutting insights at every turn, cloaked in a dreamy, all-enveloping atmosphere that seduces the reader with every sentence. . . . Iris Chase Griffen is one of the most memorable in a long line of dangerous, driven Atwood women.... In The Blind Assassin, [Atwood’s] talents are on full display.”
—The Times-Picayune
“Enthralling. . . . Unforgettable. . . . Iris Chase is a brilliant addition to Atwood’s roster of fascinating fictional narrators. Not only is her story sinuously complex, but she is entertaining company.”
—Time
“Complex and rich in period detail.... [A] stylish family saga.”
—People
“The Blind Assassin has enough mysteries to keep even a casual reader engaged. . . . There is a steely quality to Ms. Atwood’s writing that’s a bit scary but also exhilarating; no one gets away with anything.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Rewarding. . . . Intricate. . . . Atwood continues to stretch the bounds of fictional technique.”
—The Seattle Times
“Sexy, readable, far-fetched, and intelligent.... Atwood brings style and substance together to make a beautiful plaster cast of all the proprieties and constrictions of the bourgeois colonial town that, in the decades after the war, British Toronto still was, and adds to it the vivid colors of human cruelty, love, and sin.”
—Vince Passaro, Elle
“An intricately structured, often poetically rendered novel that’s also graced by [Atwood’s] mordant wit. . . . So flush is The Blind Assassin with knowing, telling details, it’s almost possible to close the book feeling the author has again slipped the bonds to create a fiction more persuasive than reality.”
—Daily News
“Assured. . . . A harsh portrait of class warfare and sexual exploitation, a knowing satire of pulp fiction and literary cultism, and an unflinching meditation on the uses of art, all wrapped up with Atwood’s customary aplomb.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Atwood’s best novel to date.... It’s a fair bet that The Blind Assassin will join that list of novels that stand beyond the reach of criticism.”
—The Denver Post
“The Blind Assassin is by far the most intricately plotted of Atwood’s novels to date, a puzzle designed to beguile the reader much as the tales of Scheherazade beguiled King Shahryar.”
—The Oregonian
“Intricate, haunting.... The Blind Assassin . . . is the kind of story so full of intrigue and desperation that you take it to bed with you simply because you can’t bear to put it down. . . . Atwood has achieved an astonishing