5 Margaret Atwood books to read if you love The Handmaid's Tale

And if you loved that adaptation as much as we did, but haven’t otherwise had much engagement with Atwood’s work, then you’ve come to the right place.

An active novelist since the 1960s there is a huge body of Atwood’s work for you, and us, to choose from, but to help you out we’ve narrowed it down to five to get you started. If nothing else they’ll give you an idea of the vast range of genres and ideas the grande dame of Canadian literature has explored, and will certainly leave you wanting more.

The MaddAddam Trilogy

OK, so we’re sneaking in three books under one heading here, but we’re sure you’ll forgive us. The trilogy begins with Oryx & Crake – released in 2003 – and introduces the character of Snowman, who lives on his own in a bleak, seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape. Flashbacks reveal more about this character and his life in a society that is being altered irrevocably by scientists playing at gene mutation. In spite of all these sci-fi tropes, Atwood calls the book a love story.

It was followed by Year of the Flood (2009), which is a sort of retelling of Oryx & Crake from another angle, featuring a cast of new and recurring characters also coping with a world in chaos. And in 2013 Atwood published MaddAddam. With these books, we’re back in similar territory to The Handmaid’s Tale, but if you think Margaret Atwood is all about the speculative, think again – our next recommendation is anything but.

‘A satisfying conclusion to Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of dystopic novels, not least because it subverts the soullessness that sometimes characterises this mode’

The Independent on MaddAddam

Alias Grace

This work of historical fiction – published in 1996 – drew on the real life slayings of a housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, and her wealthy employer/lover Thomas Kinnear in Canada in 1843. Grace Marks, who lends her name to the title, was convicted of Kinnear’s murder along with her colleague James McDermott – but the case was always controversial, with many campaigning to set her free (McDermott’s sentence was public hanging).

Atwood tells part of the story via a fictional doctor called Simon Jordan, who interviews Grace. Although his interest is initially scientific, he is drawn into Grace’s tale and mystified at how this modest woman could’ve been involved in such a violent event. The New York Times praised the book for the ‘liveliness with which Ms Atwood toys with both our expectations and the conventions of the Victorian thriller’. It was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize, eventually losing out to Graham Swift’s Last Orders.

Like The Handmaid’s Tale this work has also been given the mini-series treatment, with Netflix making a six-hour adaptation.

The Blind Assassin

Alias Grace is just one of Margaret Atwood’s numerous Booker Prize nominations, but it was with her 2000 novel The Blind Assassin that she won the award, chosen ahead of a shortlist which included Kazuo Ishiguro and Trezza Azzopardi.

Narrated by Iris Chase Griffen, a cantankerous 81-year-old, The Blind Assassin switches between her present day life as a poor, infirm woman in a small Canadian town, and the story of her beautiful, talented sister Laura Chase, whose suicide as a young woman opens the novel’s action.

This extraordinary book encompasses much of the 20th century’s history including the Second World War, while at the same time containing an embedded science fiction novel written by one of The Blind Assassin’s characters. There’s plenty of family drama and romance thrown in, resulting in a book that’s both a page turner and an achievement in modern literature. Time magazine chose it as one of the 100 best novels published since 1923.

‘A tour-de-force of nested narratives, subtle reveals and buried memories’

Time magazine on The Blind Assassin

Hag Seed

Maybe your heart feels heavy when you hear the words ‘contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare’, but fear not – Atwood’s take on The Tempest was described by The Guardian as ‘riotous, insanely readable and just the best fun’.

In it, the character of Prospero is reimagined as Felix, the artistic director of a Canadian theatre festival. He has spent 12 years plotting his revenge against a rival theatre director who thwarted the staging of what he planned as his masterpiece, an ambitious production of The Tempest.

Felix’s reprisal plan includes inmates involved in a prison drama scheme, an Ariel who transforms periodically into a firefly, and a rap song. What could possibly go wrong?

Hag Seed is part of a series of books commissioned by Vintage called Hogarth Shakespeare, which sees Shakespeare’s works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today. The project celebrates 100 years since Virginia and Leonard Woolf set up the Hogarth Press in 1917. Other books in this series include Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (The Winter’s Tale), Howard Jacobson’s Shylock is My Name (The Merchant of Venice) and Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (The Taming of the Shrew).

Cat’s Eye

Published in 1988, Cat’s Eye is about a painter, Elaine Risley, who returns to her hometown of Toronto aged 50, for a retrospective of her work.

She begins looking back on her childhood, school years, and her emergence as a feminist artist. At the heart of these remembrances is Cordelia, a friend who bullied Elaine almost to death but to whom Elaine remains drawn, even after the power she holds over her is broken by, of all things, a vision of the Virgin Mary.

As they grow older, Cordelia and Elaine’s roles swap – Elaine finds success in her work as an artist while Cordelia struggles with her mental health, eventually ending up in an institution and asking Elaine to help her escape.

If you’re suffering the trauma of childhood bullying maybe this isn’t the novel for you – Atwood powerful captures the desperation of characters trapped and alone, living a nightmare. But at the same time, it is a poignant and moving story about female friendship, which just might be cathartic.

‘The precise and devastating detail, the sense of the ordinary transformed into nightmare, the quiet desperation of characters trapped, silenced, utterly alone’

New York Times on Cat’s Eye