The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin is a novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, first published in 2000. It won the Booker Prize in 2000 and the Hammett Prize in 2001.

Iris Chase Griffen narrates the book as an old woman, and what she is remembering is her sister Laura. The two of them grew up comfortably but without a mother in a small town in southern Ontario, and their lives take shape around the family business, the Depression years and Iris's marriage to a Toronto industrialist called Richard Griffen, which is not a happy one. Atwood sets the sisters' story against the public events of the period, including the march of unemployed men on Ottawa and a 1934 political rally in Toronto, and she interrupts the narrative with newspaper reports that comment on the family from outside it.

The novel also contains a novel: The Blind Assassin, a book attributed to Laura but published by Iris, in which two lovers meet in secret and one of them tells a science fiction story. The reader has to work out how the book inside the book relates to the sisters and to the pulp magazines that one of its characters writes for.

Atwood moves between the memoir, the embedded novel and the newspaper cuttings, so the same family is seen from three angles at once, and none of them is complete on its own.