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Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories

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About this listen

A man finds himself surrounded by women who are becoming paler, more silent and literally smaller; a woman's intimate life is strangely dominated by the fear of nuclear warfare; a melancholy teenage love is swept away by a hurricane, while a tired, middle-aged affection is rekindled by the spectacle of rare Jamaican birds...

In these exceptional short stories, by turns funny and searingly honest, Margaret Atwood captures brilliantly the complex forces that govern our relationships, and the powerful emotions that guide them.

 Anthologies & Short Stories Fiction Short Stories

Critic reviews

An acute and poetic observer of the eternal, universal, rum relationships between men and women
If anyone has better insight into women and their central problem - men - than Margaret Atwood, and can voice them with as much wit, impact and grace, then they haven't started writing yet
Sophisticated, reticent, ornate, stark, supple, stiff, savage or forgiving...they are stories from the prime of life
An outstanding correspondent on the war between the sexes writes as wittily as ever on the hopes and shortcomings of women who bake for poets, sleep with their accountants, attribute their preference for awful men to fearlessness, and don't know how much they scare their own mothers
All stars
Most relevant
Margaret Atwood must surely be one of the greatest living writers. These stories are of course well crafted; well narrated too. Observations of others, confessions of the story-tellers. Sometimes the insights seem so personal that they seem to stray into reminiscence, but she is such a skilled writer that I would never work it out for myself if/where the boundary with fiction might be. But only 4 stars from me this time because I much prefer the greater depth allowed by her novels like Oryx and Crake and the best for me, The Blind Assassin.

spare and sophisticated

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