The Blind Assassin
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
Why read it
An elderly woman recalls her sister's mysterious death in 1945, just after the war ended, while a scandalous novel-within-the-novel, published under the dead sister's name, tells of clandestine lovers and a pulp science-fiction tale they invent together.
Atwood nests three stories inside one another, a memoir of two sisters in a declining industrial family, a secret love affair, and the lurid alien fable the lovers spin, gradually revealing how they connect. It is a layered mystery about memory, storytelling, and the buried truths of a woman's life.
Published in 2000, The Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize that year. It stands among Margaret Atwood's most acclaimed works and is often cited as a high point of her career.
- 01
Stories within stories
What awaits is a novel that folds a memoir, a scandalous romance, and a pulp sci-fi tale into one design.
- 02
A death to unravel
Laura's fatal plunge from a bridge hangs over the book as its central question.
- 03
The Chase sisters
Iris and Laura's bond, shaped by a crumbling family fortune, holds a decades-old secret.
- 04
Who really wrote it
The authorship of the embedded novel becomes the key that unlocks everything.
The opening revelation of Laura driving her car off a bridge days after the war's end.
The clandestine meetings of the unnamed lovers, who pass the time inventing the science-fiction tale of the blind assassin.
