Description
In an imaginative, multi-layered novel, Iris describes the 1945 death of her sister, Laura, who drives her car off a bridge, followed, two years later, by the death of her husband, a wealthy industrialist whose body is found aboard a sailboat, in a story that features a novel-within-a-novel about two unnamed lovers who meet in a dark backstreet room. Winner of the Booker Prize. Reprint. 300,000 first printing.
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“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” These words are spoken by Iris Chase Griffen, married at eighteen to a wealthy industrialist but now poor and eighty-two. Iris recalls her far from exemplary life, and the events leading up to her sister’s death, gradually revealing the carefully guarded Chase family secrets. Among these is “The Blind Assassin,” a novel that earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following. Sexually explicit for its time, it was a pulp fantasy improvised by two unnamed lovers who meet secretly in rented rooms and seedy cafés. As this novel-within-a-novel twists and turns through love and jealousy, self-sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real narrative, as both move closer to war and catastrophe. Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning sensation combines elements of gothic drama, romantic suspense, and science fiction fantasy in a spellbinding tale.
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