Bluebeard's Egg - by Margaret Atwood (Paperback)

About the Book

By turns humorous, warm, stark, and frightening, these stories glow with childhood memories, the reality of parents growing old, and the casual cruelty men and women inflict on one another. Here is the familiar outer world of family summers at remote lakes, winters of political activism, and seasons of exotic friends, mundane lives, and unexpected loves. But here, too, is the inner world of hidden places and all that emerges from them.

Book Synopsis

By turns humorous and warm, stark and poignant, these stories from the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments probe childhood memories, the reality of parents growing old, and the casual cruelty men and women can inflict on one another.

A tenuous teenage love affair fails to survive a hurricane; a man notices the women around him becoming progressively paler and smaller; a surgeon who specializes in hearts seems oddly emotionally opaque to his wife; a middle-aged couple's waning affection rekindles at the spectacle of rare Jamaican birds. In these exceptional short stories, Margaret Atwood proves herself once again a true master of the form.

Review Quotes

"A book to be read and re-read, to be talked about and savored. . . . Atwood [is] writing at top form, writing with total control of her material, with sureness, with touches of brilliance." --The London Free Press

"This collection . . . attests, again, to Ms. Atwood's range as a writer, her ability to set forth her view of the world . . . in both lyrical, meditative tales and wry, crackly satires. . . . These stories are strewn, like a starry sky, with shimmering images and bright metaphors." --The New York Times

"A startlingly original voice." --Washington Post Book World

"Atwood's prose in Bluebeard's Egg is powerful, elegant and mellifluous to an extraordinary degree." --Quill and Quire

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.