In 1975, in an unidentified Indian city, Mrs Dina Dalal, a financially pressed Parsi widow in her early 40s sets up a sweatshop of sorts in her ramshackle apartment. Determined to remain financially independent and to avoid a second marriage, she takes in a boarder and two Hindu tailors to sew dresses for an export company. As the four share the...more

With the same stunning blend of prophecy and social satire she brought to her classic The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood gives us a keenly prescient novel about the future of humanity—and its present. Humanity here equals Snowman, and in Snowman’s recollections Atwood re-creates a time much like our own, when a boy named Jimmy loved an elus...more

"It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward," writes Margaret Atwood, towards the end of her impressive and complex new novel, The Blind Assassin. It's a melancholic account of why writers write--and readers read--and one that frames the different lives told through this book. The Blind Assassin is (at least) two nove...more

Winning the Man Booker prize is something that most authors dream of, although -- ironically -- the reputation of the prize itself was under siege a few years ago. Books that won the award were acquiring a reputation of being difficult and inaccessible, but those days appear to be over -- and unarguable proof may be found in the 2008 winner, The Wh...more

As far back as she can remember, Codi Noline had felt an outsider in her hometown of Grace, Arizona. Her dispassionate father - 'an obelisk of disapproval' - had always kept Codi and her sister Hallie apart from most of the townspeople. But now Hallie is abroad and Codi, troubled and lost, is returning after a fifteen-year absence to confront her p...more

As soon as Octavia caught a glimpse of Jeremy in the nightclub, she knew she just had to have him. It didn’t matter that he was engaged to an old school friend of hers, Gussie. An invitation to join them on a cozy weekend is the perfect opportunity. But the the whizz-kid business tycoon Gareth Llewellyn come along too and manages to thwart her pl...more

Twelve-year-old Harriet is doing her best to grow up, which is not easy as her mother is permanently on medication, her father has silently moved to another city, and her serene sister rarely notices anything. All of them are still suffering from the shocking and mysterious death of her brother Robin twelve years earlier, and it seems to Harriet th...more