M argaret Atwood—prolific author and two-time Booker Prize-winner—has written more than fifty books , but she is best known for her multi-million-copy-selling novels of many genres, from feminist dystopia (The Handmaid’s Tale Alias Grace Life Before Man . Here, we put together a full list of her novels for adults, in order of publication, for those who plan to work their way through her full back catalogue.
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Novels by Margaret Atwood, in order of publication:
In Margaret Atwood's debut novel, first published in 1969, a passive young woman on the cusp of marriage finds herself unable to eat. At first, it's meat. Soon, vegetables too. A proto-feminist text that wrestles with misogyny, consumerism and traditional gender roles—themes, in other words, that Atwood's will confront repeatedly throughout her career.
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In Margaret Atwood's second novel, an unnamed woman returns to the remote Canadian island where she grew up. Piecing together clues found in the contents of the family cabin, she sets off in search of her missing father. It as much a portrait of a complicated woman and Silent Revolution-era Quebec as it is a mystery. Published in 1972 and adapted as a film of the same name in 1981.
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A romance novelist enjoying late-in-life literary success decides to fake her own death after a figure from the past threatens to dig up her darkest secrets. Margaret Atwood's third novel: a comic yet probing exploration of the many facets of a woman. Published in 1976.
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A literary portrait of an unhappy marriage in 1970s Toronto. Nate and Elizabeth are staying together for the kids, but have come to form two points on a love pentagon or hexagon. One of Atwood's quieter, more domestic novels, but worth reading. Published in 1979.
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In Bodily Harm , Margaret Atwood's 1981 novel, a lifestyle journalists gets caught up in a violent insurrection on a tiny Caribbean island—and a love affair with an attractive but mysterious American. It is, warns a New York Times review , "unpleasant. It chooses to be so." Atwood's writing is often lyrical, but Bodily Harm is an often brutal thriller—so consider yourself warned.
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🏆 Winner of the 1987 Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction
The Handmaid’s Tale – published 1986 – is a haunting epistolary novel narrated by Offred, a woman living in a future America where environmental and societal breakdown have led to the establishment of a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. In Gilead, women have been stripped of their fundamental rights and reduced to their reproductive potential. Lesbians and other 'gender outlaws' are executed, as are doctors who conduct abortions. The Handmaid's Tale is generally recognised as a modern classic. It has been adapted for the screen several times, most recently as a multi-Emmy Award-winning television series starring Elisabeth Moss (who also narrates the audiobook of The Handmaid's Tale ). A sequel, The Testaments,
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“Elaine is a painter. She is haunted by memories, and specifically one girl from the past: Cordelia. While she’s in Toronto, memory is used as a narrative tool to take us back to these episodes of childhood, when Elaine was very young and looking for a friend. She wants to be with the girls, and to do what the girls are doing. Cordelia, unfortunately, is a bully and a sadist and tortures Elaine in many ways. The whole thing builds to a damaging, destructive, horrible experience, that even forty years on Elaine hasn’t shaken. What stops it wallowing in despair is Atwood’s writing. She balances it all perfectly. It’s inspiring and off-putting at the same time.” Read more...
The best books on Friendship
Emma Jane Unsworth ,
Novelist
Three former university friends, brought together by a funeral, reminisce about their former friend and nemesis. But when she is spotted around town they realise that her reign of chaos is not yet over. Loosely inspired by the traditional tale 'The Robber Bridegroom' as recorded by the Brothers Grimm and first published as a novel in 1993.
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“This is the story of a house servant, who was convicted of murdering her employer and his housekeeper. She begins to recount her life to this psychiatrist who is trying to determine whether she deserves a pardon. The central tension is whether she is guilty, although at the same time it almost doesn’t matter. The novel, which I love, subverts the whodunnit trope; you’re not trying to discover the truth, you’re trying to uncover her character. I really remember the dreamy quality of it, and my frustration over the ambiguity of the case. I was very drawn into the complex psychology of it, and what it was trying to do.” Read more...
Historical Novels Set in the Victorian Era
Virginia Feito ,
Novelist
A brilliantly clever historical novel featuring two wealthy sisters from a fictional Ontario town, featuring a novel-within-a-novel-within-a-novel—or something like it. To enjoy it, one must allow the action to unfurl in all directions—back and forth in time, and refracted through the characters' metafictional counterparts—and simply trust that it will all come together in the end.
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“It’s a really strange novel…it’s on my list because I’ve never seen anything like it. The words in the title, they’re animals, but they actually refer to people. One of them, Crake, is a scientist, a genetic engineer; and essentially, he’s a sort of evil villain character. He’s really, really interesting. He engineers a great pandemic, which wipes out most of the world. And he is in a relationship with this very ethereal woman, who we never really get to know very well, who is known as Oryx. It’s a difficult book to summarise, because it’s very hallucinatory and weird! Every aspect of it is brighter than life, somehow. The basic plot follows a man who in the narrative present is called the Snowman, and he lives in a post-apocalyptic world. He’s surrounded by these very innocent humans who seem a lot like the Eloi in The Time Machine by HG Wells” Read more...
The Best Sci-Fi Romance Novels
Natasha Pulley ,
Novelist
“I really love the Penelopiad . It’s wonderful at bringing out some of what I already hinted was important in my work of a translator: teasing out the multiple perspectives, multiple voices, in this poem. I also love how it juxtaposes different styles and different voices. It has both ballad-like verse and prose intermixed, which is not what the Odyssey does, but I think it speaks to something which is in the Odyssey , about the mixture of different modes, different ways of seeing things.” Read more...
The best books on The Odyssey
Emily Wilson ,
Classicist
The second book in the Maddaddam trilogy
Atwood returns to the post-apocalyptic world of Oryx and Crake in this 2009 speculative novel in which a religious sect rises from the ashes of an ecological crisis. “Atwood spins the most arresting alternate mythologies to our hell-bent world," declared The Los Angeles Times: “The Year of the Flood is a slap-happy romp through the end times. Stuffed with cornball hymns, genetic mutations worth of Thomas Pynchon and a pharmaceutical company run amok, it reads like dystopia verging on satire. She may be imagining a world in flames, but she’s doing it with a dark cackle.”
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Book three in the Maddaddam trilogy
After their apocalyptic flood, the survivors join forces with the gentle 'Children of Crake' – a hybrid species created to inherit the Earth – and weave together an oral history of their ruinous world. It has, asserted the Washington Post , "just about everything you could want in a novel... wonderfully entertaining."
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In this dark, even noirish satire of capitalist culture, a poverty-stricken couple sign up for a sinister social experiment in which they each serve alternate months as prison guard and prison inmate. Atwood applies her gift for envisioning dystopian worlds that, in their exaggerated intensity, offer profound insight into our own. Published in 2015.
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In this creative reimagining of William Shakespeare's final play, theatre director Felix stages a performance of The Tempest The Blind Assassin ,
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Margaret Atwood's much-anticipated sequel to her seminal feminist dystopia The Handmaid's Tale The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments is narrated by Aunt Lydia – who readers will remember as a cruel instructor during the handmaids' induction programme – and two younger women, Agnes and Daisy.
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“It is a completely standalone, independent novel. If you read The Handmaid’s Tale , it will satisfy some of your need for understanding what happened next. If you haven’t—and incredibly, there are people who haven’t read it—it just gives you an extremely savage and exhilarating look at contemporary life and its most alarming manifestations.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2019
Peter Florence ,
The full collection of Margaret Atwood's collaborations with graphic artists Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain, first published over three volumes in 2016, 2017 and 2018. In Angel Catbird , a genetic engineer is left with superhuman powers after a chemical accident. Funny, fast-moving and perfect for fans of pulp fiction.
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