The Robber Bride - Tapa dura

'Excitements, wit and insight sizzle across the pages. Atwood's survey of impulses that bedevil life seethes with imagination, inventiveness and intelligence' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times 'Funny, thoughtful, moving Atwood's plotting is masterful, and her humor is razor-edged, sexy, and raucous' Washington Post 'It stirs depths that Cat's Eye did not reach, and grants deeper, stronger powers to women's friendship in distress' Marina Warner 'Atwood has never written better than in this novel of glittering breadth and dark, eerie depths' Sunday Times

The story of Zenia ought to begin when Zenia began. It must have been someplace long ago and distance in space, thinks Tony; someplace bruised, and very tangled. A European print, hand-tinted, ochre-coloured, with dusty sunlight and a lot of bushes in it - bushes with thick leaves and ancient twisted roots, behind which, out of sight in the undergrowth and hinted at only by a boot protruding, or a slack hand, something ordinary but horrifying is taking place. Zenia is beautiful, smart and greedy, by turns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless. She is also dead. Just to make absolutely sure Tony, Roz and Charis are there for the funeral. But five years on, as the three women share a decorous lunch, the unthinkable happens: 'with waves of ill will flowing out of her like cosmic radiation', Zenia is back