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The Blind Assassin

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About this listen

Available for the first time as a downloadable audio file.

‘Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.’ Thus begins The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood’s new novel. Laura Chase’s older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While bewailing her unreliable body and deriding those who try to help her, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life and her perilous times, but in particular on the events surrounding her sister’s tragic early death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase a dollop of notoriety as well as a cult following: as Iris says, she herself lives ‘in the long shadow cast by Laura’. Sexually explicit for its time and place, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a left-leaning man on the run.

©2000 Margaret Atwood; (P)2000 HarperCollins UK Family Life Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Women's Fiction Fiction Assassin

Critic reviews

‘…Superb reading by Lorelei King enable(s) a smoooth, easily distinguishable transition between readings from Laura’s novel, the present day of Iris’s life; and memories of her dead sister. More important, is the ability of King to allow the listener to hear the author’s voice and her message instead of that of the reader.’ Kim Bunce, The Observer.
All stars
Most relevant
I absolutely love this book. I read it 20 years ago and it was a pleasure to listen to it on audio too. The narration is great.

One of my all time favourite books.

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I read the Handmaid's Tale when younger but this is the first Margaret Atwood I've 'read' for many years and I thoroughly enjoyed it. What seems at first a series of disparate stories and a bit slow perhaps builds into a gripping conclusion. By the end I couldn't wait to get back on the motorway and find out what happened!

The narration is excellent and I thoroughly recommend this.

Excellent book

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The way you get immersed into the world is masterful. it's not easy to follow sometimes but always worth persevering.

The writing. Brilliant.

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This is a terrific novel, three intertwined narratives and Margaret Atwood’s first Booker Prize win. I read this book on its release in 2001 and I remember it was a THICK book. This audiobook only being 6 hours in length shows how much of the supposed fat was trimmed away, as I remember the book taking longer to read. I won’t post spoilers but there is an important description at the end of the book that is just… missing??

ABRIDGED TO WITHIN AN INCH OF ITS LIFE

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Having tried for around 4 years on and off, to read the unabridged book and struggling to engage with it, I finally decided out of pure bloody-minded determination to finish it one way or another, to listen to it instead, and in abridged form as I didn't know if I could handle trudging all the way through the hundreds of pages I'd already read but in audio, just to refresh my memory of the story so far, and my am I glad I did! What an excellent book! I feel haunted by the end of it, and the slow plot reveal in the last quarter was excellent. It seems I actually gave up on the original version just before it got good, but there was no way I could have known that beforehand. Lorelei King as narrator was also excellent, with her changing characterisation in the voices of each character almost sounding like a full cast as opposed to one person. Very enjoyable all round

Better as an abridged version

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