The Robber Bride

International bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood is one of the most highly acclaimed and well-known writers in the world. Now from the extraordinary imagination of Margaret Atwood comes her most intricate and subversive novel yet The Robber Bride, set mainly in Toronto in the present day, is the wise, unsettling, drastic story of three women - Roz, Charis and Tony - whose lives share a common wound: Zenia, a woman they first met as university students in the sixties. Zenia is smart and beautiful, by turns manipulative and vulnerable, the turbulent centre of her own never-ending drama. She has at various points entered into their separate lives to ensnare their sympathy, betray their trust, and exploit their weaknesses. But she's irresistible, and, as Tony says, people like Zenia can never step through your doorway unless you invite them. Now Zenia, thought dead, has suddenly reappeared - in a restaurant where the three are sharing a decorous lunch. In this richly layered narrative, Atwood skilfully evokes the decades of the past as she reveals the dark, sometimes chilling, aspects of her characters' childhoods. She retraces their lives, including their catastrophic encounters with Zenia, until we are back in the present - where it's yet to be discovered wheter Zenia's "pure, free-wheeling malevolence" can still wreak havoc. Witty, magnetic, and nourishing, The Robber Bride reports from the farthest raches of the sex wars. The men and women at the centre of this wholly involving novel all fall prey to a similar menace, a menace which is given power by their own fantasies and illusions. Brilliantly conceived and written, The Robber Bride is a novel to be savoured - for its consumately crafter prose, for its profound truths and devious humour, and, ultimately, for its compassion. This is Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and entertaining novel to date.