Wilderness Tips - by Margaret Atwood (Paperback)

About the Book

Some writers have moments when they change the way we look at ourselves and the world, but Margaret Atwood has them all the time. In this new work, she tells tales that take the reader to familiar, strange, and secret places of the imagination, with widely ranging settings for thefying stories.

Book Synopsis

The bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments "uses her powerful gifts of language and observation to delineate both the misunderstandings between men and women and the everyday sadnesses and comforts of love" (The New York Times).

In each of these stories Atwood deftly illuminates the shape of a whole life: in a few brief pages we watch as characters progress from the vulnerabilities of adolescence through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age.

The past resurfaces in the present in ways both subtle and dramatic: the body of a lost Arctic explorer emerges from the ice, a 2,000-year-old bog man turns up in an archeological dig, a man with dark secrets marries his lover's sister, a girl who disappears on a canoe trip haunts her friend many decades later.

The richly layered stories in Wilderness Tips map interior landscapes shaped by time, regret, and lost chances, endowing even the most unassuming of lives with a disquieting intensity.

Review Quotes

"Each of the stories in Wilderness Tips is a gem, a glittering piece to which one is drawn again and again. To read them is to enter a startling world: strange and too close for comfort." --The Denver Post

"[A] sense of time's fluidity and motion informs this dazzling collection. . . . [Atwood] uses her powerful gifts of language and observation to delineate both the misunderstandings between men and women and the everyday sadnesses and comforts of love." --The New York Times

"Atwood's voice . . . is sharper than ever, but still funny. . . . It whispers that the wilderness is right here, right now." --San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade.

Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.