Alias Grace [Paperback]

In 1843, a 16-year-old Canadian housemaid named Grace Marks was tried for the murder of her employer and his mistress. The sensationalistic trial made headlines throughout the world, and the jury delivered a guilty verdict. Yet opinion remained fiercely divided about Marks- -was she a spurned woman who had taken out her rage on two innocent victims, or was she an unwilling victim herself, caught up in a crime she was too young to understand? Such doubts persuaded the judges to commute her sentence to life imprisonment, and Marks spent the next 30 years in an assortment of jails and asylums, where she was often exhibited as a star attraction. In Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood reconstructs Marks's story in fictional form. Her portraits of 19th-century prison and asylum life are chilling in their detail. The author also introduces Dr Simon Jordan, who listens to the prisoner's tale with a mixture of sympathy and disbelief. In his effort to uncover the truth, Jordan uses the tools of the then rudimentary science of psychology. But the last word belongs to the book's narrator--Grace herself.

A sensuous, perplexing book, at once sinister and dignified, grubby and gorgeous, panoramic yet specific...I don't think I have ever been so thrilled...This, surely is as far as a novel can go (Julie Myerson, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY )

Brilliant...Atwood's prose is searching. So intimate it seems to be written on the skin (Hilary Mantel )

Margaret Atwood is to be congratulated (Anita Brookner, SPECTATOR )

The outstanding novelist of our age (Peter Kemp, SUNDAY TIMES )

A book that gets better with each read.

* Reissued in a new look

Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor.' Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim? Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created an extraordinarily potent tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery.

Locked up at the age of sixteen for the bloody murders of her employer and his housekeeper, Grace Marks was lucky not to have been hung. But the questions remain: innocent or guilty, instigator or innocent dupe? Sixteen years later, Dr Simon Jordan, an expert in amnesia, is given access to Grace, who now spends most of her days as a servant in the home of the prison Governor, befriended by the Governor's wife who believes in her innocence. And so the days and the weeks pass as Simon tries to prise open the memories Grace claims to have lost and reveals a life of love and betrayal, bitter poverty and brutal abuse, drawing the listener in to the rooms of Grace's mind.

Shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize.

Margaret Atwood is Canada's most eminent novelist and poet. She has won many awards including the SUNDAY TIMES Author of the Year Award and she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times.