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    The Blind Assassin
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    The Blind Assassin
    Unavailable
    The Blind Assassin
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    The Blind Assassin

    Written by Margaret Atwood

    Narrated by Lorelei King

    4.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    Available for the first time as a downloadable audio file.

    ‘Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.’ Thus begins The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood’s new novel. Laura Chase’s older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While bewailing her unreliable body and deriding those who try to help her, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life and her perilous times, but in particular on the events surrounding her sister’s tragic early death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase a dollop of notoriety as well as a cult following: as Iris says, she herself lives ‘in the long shadow cast by Laura’. Sexually explicit for its time and place, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a left-leaning man on the run.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 15, 2005
    ISBN9780007218448
    Unavailable
    The Blind Assassin
    Author

    Margaret Atwood

    Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of over fifty books, including fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning television series, her works include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; Hag-Seed; The Testaments, which won the Booker Prize and was long-listed for the Giller Prize; and the poetry collection Dearly. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in Great Britain for her services to literature. She lives in Toronto.

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    Reviews for The Blind Assassin

    4.5/5

    102 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Enjoyed but feel that it was a very quick read due to the fact it was heavily abridged

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The relationship between the sisters is truly interesting and ultimately relatable. Although ait is a sad story, with almost everybody heartbroken, Atwood manages to leave me at peace at the end of the book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The story is great but the narrator is really awesome .
    • 4/5
      Once again, literary maestro Margaret Atwood has produced another creative mega-feat. Her novel in a novel reminds me of her other work Hagseed, also exploring the theme of revenge.

      However, there is very little to laugh about in this story in which narrator Iris, at the end of her life, describes the mysterious circumstances that her sister, husband and lover all died in. Younger sibling Laura is said to have been killed after her car edged off a cliff, all the while leaving the world with a controversial novel that describes a racy affair.

      Iris reveals the truth about the incidents from her perspective, which means we always see Laura as child-like and naive, while her husband Richard and his sister Winifred are portrayed as cardboard villains. With that in mind, Atwood's characters are realistic because they are all just points of view from one person. Great twists in this book.