Margaret Atwood
Canadian · b. 1939
About the Author
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, essayist, and literary critic whose work explores power, gender, memory, survival, and the fragile edges of society. Her fiction moves between literary realism, historical fiction, speculative fiction, and dystopian imagination.
Where to Start
Start with The Handmaid's Tale for Atwood's most iconic dystopian vision. Choose Alias Grace if you prefer literary historical fiction, or Oryx and Crake if you want her speculative imagination at its most unsettling.
Main Books
Best Books by This Author
The Testaments
2019
Set years after The Handmaid's Tale , The Testaments expands the world of Gilead through multiple voices and a closer look at power from inside the system.
View Book DetailsHag-Seed
2016
Atwood reimagines Shakespeare's The Tempest through Felix, a theatre director seeking revenge by staging the play inside a prison literacy program.
View Book DetailsThe Heart Goes Last
2015
In a collapsing economy, a couple joins a social experiment that promises stability, but its perfect order hides control, exploitation, and disturbing secrets.
View Book DetailsMaddAddam
2013
The final book in the MaddAddam trilogy brings together survivors, myths, memories, and new forms of humanity in the aftermath of a broken world.
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The Year of the Flood
2009
The second novel in the MaddAddam trilogy tells the story of survivors connected to God's Gardeners, a religious ecological group living in the shadow of corporate collapse.
View Book DetailsThe Penelopiad
2005
Atwood retells the story of Penelope from The Odyssey , giving voice to the famous waiting wife and the twelve maids whose deaths haunt the myth.
View Book DetailsOryx and Crake
2003
In a devastated future shaped by biotechnology, corporate greed, and ecological collapse, Snowman remembers the brilliant and dangerous figures of Oryx and Crake.
View Book DetailsThe Blind Assassin
2000
A layered novel of family secrets, lost love, social decline, and stories within stories, The Blind Assassin moves between memoir, newspaper fragments, and a mysterious science-fiction tale.
View Book DetailsAlias Grace
1996
Inspired by a real nineteenth-century case, Alias Grace follows Grace Marks, a servant convicted in a notorious murder case, as memory, truth, and storytelling blur.
View Book DetailsThe Robber Bride
1993
Three women are haunted by Zenia, a charismatic and destructive figure who has entered their lives, taken what she wanted, and left emotional wreckage behind.
View Book DetailsCat's Eye
1988
Elaine Risley, a painter returning to Toronto for a retrospective of her work, confronts childhood memories of friendship, cruelty, art, shame, and survival.
View Book DetailsThe Handmaid's Tale
1985
In the Republic of Gilead, Offred lives under a rigid authoritarian society that controls women's bodies, language, relationships, and memory.
View Book DetailsBodily Harm
1981
Rennie Wilford, a travel journalist recovering from illness and emotional shock, travels to the Caribbean and finds herself drawn into political violence and personal danger.
View Book DetailsLife Before Man
1979
Set in Toronto, this novel follows three emotionally entangled adults whose relationships, losses, betrayals, and private disappointments reveal the quiet brutality of modern life.
View Book DetailsLady Oracle
1976
Joan Foster, a writer of gothic romances, fakes her own death and looks back on a life shaped by secrets, reinvention, body image, fantasy, and performance.
View Book DetailsSurfacing
1972
A woman returns to a remote island in northern Quebec to search for her missing father, but the journey becomes an unsettling descent into memory, nature, nationalism, and fractured selfhood.
View Book DetailsThe Edible Woman
1969
Margaret Atwood's debut novel follows Marian McAlpin, a young woman whose ordinary life begins to feel strangely unstable as marriage, work, identity, and appetite close in around her.
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