It’s 25 years since the publication of The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood’s intricately plotted, multi-narrative novel which led to her first Booker prize win. Blending romance, pulpy sci-fi and family drama, it opens with octogenarian Iris Chase Griffen recalling the moment she was told her sister, Laura, had driven off a bridge. The police inform her that two people witnessed Laura deliberately swerve off the road. Though Iris believes this to be true, she insists to the officers that it was an accident.
We go on to hear about Iris’s privileged upbringing and marriage of convenience to Richard Griffen, the wealthy owner of a button factory, and her estrangement from her granddaughter with whom she hopes to reconcile. The book also contains excerpts from Laura’s posthumously published novel which features clandestine romantic encounters between an unnamed man – seemingly a fugitive – and a wealthy woman. During their trysts, they concoct a wild fable about life on a distant planet. All this is interspersed with newspaper items reporting on the lives of the Chases and Griffins over 60 years.
This is one of a series of new audio recordings of Atwood novels made exclusively with Canadian actors; others include Alias Grace, Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride and the Oryx and Crake trilogy. The Blind Assassin comes with three narrators: Emma Love reads the novel-within-a-novel; David Attar delivers the newspaper reports; and Jennifer Higgin is the inscrutable, complex Iris whose actions are a puzzle to be decoded. “You want the truth of course,” she says, addressing the listener. “You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth.”
Available via Little, Brown Audio, 23hr 2min
When the GoingWas GoodGraydon Carter, WF Howes, 12hr 29minThe former Vanity Fair editor documents his star-studded career in magazine publishing. Read by the author.
Missing White WomanKellye Garrett, Simon & Schuster Audio, 11hr 59minAriel Blake narrates this thriller in which a woman wakes up during a romantic weekend break to find a body in her holiday rental and her boyfriend nowhere to be found.