Author Margaret Atwood posing for a portrait in Toronto, Canada.

Where to start with Margaret Atwood: a guide to her best books

From her most famous novels to more experimental works, from recent triumphs to the book that started it all, here’s our guide to the very best of the two-time Booker Prize winner’s fiction

Written by Sarah Shaffi

Published July 22, 2024

Margaret Atwood is one of our most celebrated living authors – and one of the most prolific. But with so many books to her name, deciding which one to read first can seem daunting. And the fact that she is the recipient of multiple awards, including two Booker Prizes (and is one of only five writers to have been nominated for the prize six or more times) could make some readers feel that her work is likely be a challenge.

Thankfully, Atwood’s books are so readable that there’s nothing to fear. Yes, critics love her, and yes, she is studied in schools and universities around the world, and yes, her writing contains layers and layers of meaning. At its core, though, her fiction is clear and compelling, with rip-roaring plots and fascinating characters who you love, hate, or love to hate.

Fans include the novelist Ali Smith, who said of Atwood: ‘Formative? For sure. Liberating? Always, into an intelligence whose quality is exact, exacting, but also merry – a sheer relief. All this time she’s taken our times and made us wise to them. What gifts she’s given us.’

Since 1969, Atwood has written 17 novels, as well as 18 books of poetry, 11 works of non-fiction, nine collections of short stories, eight children’s books and three graphic novels. A new poetry collection, Paper Boat, is out later this year, but readers will have to wait a little longer to read her 2014 title Scribbler Moon, the manuscript of which will be locked away in a library in Oslo, Norway, until the year 2114 as part of the Future Library Project.

Figuring out where to begin, then, is no easy feat, although once you’ve started reading Margaret Atwood, the hardest thing is to stop. Here’s our guide to the best of her fiction, to help you on your way…

If you only read one

The Handmaid’s Tale is the book Margaret Atwood is most famous for, and is her most discussed work, which are two very good reasons to read it. But of course, the best reason to do so is because it’s a masterpiece that, almost 40 years after its publication, still speaks to the world we live in.

First published in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a near-future New England, where a patriarchal and totalitarian regime, known as the Republic of Gilead, rules in place of the overthrown American government. In this world lives Offred, one of a number of women designated as Handmaids, placed into servitude to produce children for the ruling men of Gilead. Evading the gaze of the Eyes and the Aunts, Offred learns about a resistance movement, Mayday, which could help free her from the life into which she has been forced.

Although the book offers a dystopian vision, Atwood famously said that everything she included in it is based on reality, which is what makes it so believable, disturbing and relevant. ‘I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist,’ she wrote in an essay for Lit Hub in 2018.

The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1986 (its not-quite sequel, The Testaments, jointly won the prize in 2019), but it’s Atwood’s skill for fictionalising humanity’s most depraved and disturbing acts that have helped the novel remain relevant. It found a new popularity in the late 2010s, thanks both to a hit television adaptation and, less joyfully, the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, as well as a surge in support for right-wing governments around the world. Atwood’s vision of societies in which women are treated as second-class beings and had their rights curbed suddenly felt more topical than ever.

The book’s handmaids – with their distinctive red dresses and white winged bonnets – were adopted as symbols of the fight against the restriction of abortion rights, among other things. ‘Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,’ goes Atwood’s made-up phrase in The Handmaid’s Tale, which roughly translates as ‘don’t let the bastards get you down’. It was, and remains, a slogan of hope and resistance, one that succinctly shows the power of fiction to articulate the most urgent real-world concerns.

‘Some books haunt the reader,’ wrote Atwood in 2018. ‘Others haunt the writer. The Handmaid’s Tale has done both.’

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If you love retellings

A pairing between William Shakespeare and Margaret Atwood is probably not surprising, given both are essential parts of the English-language literary canon. But Hag-Seed, Atwood’s 2016 retelling of The Tempest for the Hogarth Shakespeare project (a series of books aiming to make the playwright’s works more relevant to a modern audience) is perhaps not quite what you were expecting.

The Tempest is a tragi-comedy, following the lives of the wizard and former Duke of Milan Prospero and his daughter Miranda, who live on a remote island with their two servants, Caliban and Ariel. When his brother Antonio’s ship passes the island, Prospero conjures a storm that shipwrecks Antonio and a number of others, leading to a story of love and revenge.

Atwood takes crucial elements of The Tempest to create a mischievous and inventive homage to Shakespeare. Her Prospero is Felix, a theatre director who, about to put on the greatest play of his life (an ambitious interpretation of The Tempest – a nod to Shakespeare’s love of plays within plays), is cast out of society thanks to the interference of his rival Tony. Twelve long years later, Felix gets to enact his revenge, putting on that same play with the inmates of a prison and drawing an unwitting Tony into being involved, and putting him in the right place at the right time to be brought down by Felix.

Atwood’s skill in Hag-Seed is to craft a piece of writing that speaks to both those who know the original Shakespeare play and those who don’t; for both sets of readers, the book is a fun and funny, although meaningful, look at revenge, grief and love, with complicated characters and intricate plotting that lead to a raucous ending.

Its success is partly down to Atwood’s intimate knowledge of the original play, although she admits it took her a while to decide how to reinterpret it. ‘Why had I chosen The Tempest?’ she wrote in the Guardian. ‘Really it was impossible! What was the modern-day equivalent of a magician marooned on an island for 12 years with a now adolescent daughter? You couldn’t write that straight: all the islands are known, there are satellites now, they would have been rescued by a helicopter in no time flat. And what about the flying air spirit? And the Caliban figure?’

Her concerns soon dissipated, and the result of wrestling with all those questions is a book that surely even Shakespeare himself would find a rich and satisfying entertainment.

If you want something to dip into

‘Novelist’ is the first word many think of when it comes to Atwood, but she’s also a very skilled short story writer (not to mention poet), and her excellence in the form can be seen in Old Babes in the Wood, the most recent of her short story collections, published in 2023.

Dedicated to Atwood’s partner of almost 50 years, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019, Old Babes in the Wood is a series of tales about lives well lived and loved, and with its older protagonists is a beautiful and sometimes quirky look at aging.

The collection is split into three parts, with the first and third focusing on a married couple (section one is titled ‘Tig & Nell’, section three ‘Nell & Tig’), who are very loosely based on Atwood and Gibson; she has described the stories as ‘autofiction’ rather than memoir. Tig and Nell were first introduced in Atwood’s 2006 collection Moral Disorder, and in Old Babes in the Wood the couple are older and (spoiler alert), we discover that Tig has recently died, leaving Nell to navigate a new life without her beloved.

‘Grieving takes strange forms,’ Atwood tells us in ‘Morte de Smudgie’, the third story in the book, in which Nell deals with the passing of her cat by rewriting Tennyson’s famous poem Morte d’Arthur. For Atwood, strange forms manifest in the stories in Old Babes in the Wood, which are often infused with a speculative edge found in much of the author’s fiction. Nell and Tig’s life is tinged with absurdity, while other stories involve a many-tentacled alien creature and a talking snail.

For all the wonderful weirdness of Old Babes in the Wood, it’s the very real human emotions that make it so good, from the love Tig and Nell feel for each other to the friendships they have and the grief that they (and in particular Nell) must learn to live with. This is a complete and coherent collection, but each story demands you read it, absorb it and sit with it before moving on to the next, making it an ideal book to dip in and out of over a period of time.

Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

If you want to see where it all began

In a New York Times review of The Edible Woman, Atwood’s first novel, English professor Millicent Bell described it as ‘a work of feminist Black humour’, words that would go on to be used in some variation to describe much of Atwood’s fiction. With its story of a woman who increasingly finds her impending marriage indigestible (literally and figuratively), The Edible Woman contains many of the ideas and themes Atwood returns to again and again in her work.

The Edible Woman follows Marian, who works in market research and is ‘abnormally normal’, engaged to Peter and living a life in contrast to her flatmate Ainsley, who is having a baby whose father is no longer in the picture. But Marian hasn’t accounted for her inner self, which wants something more than the well-laid plans on which she is relying; soon, Marian’s resistance to a so-called normal life manifests in a growing revulsion towards food.

The absurdity and speculative elements which characterise much of Atwood’s fiction are clear to see in The Edible Woman, as is Atwood’s ability to bring together the comic and the tragic through astute observations and a dose of satire, something a 1970 article in Kirkus Reviews also noted: ‘For its intelligence gentled by sympathy, its eye for telltale detail, and its humour which ranges from wit to some waywardly funny scenes – a distinct pleasure to read.’

If you want an insight into the writer Atwood became, this is the place to start.

If you want to see fact become fiction

For Alias Grace, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996, Atwood took the real-life case of Grace Marks, an Irish-Canadian maid who was convicted for her involvement in the murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear, who was killed alongside his housekeeper and lover Nancy Montgomery by a servant, James McDermott. Grace was imprisoned for life (McDermott was hanged) but her conviction was the cause of much controversy, with arguments over whether she was instrumental to the crime or an unwitting accessory.

It’s this uncertainty that lies at the heart of Alias Grace, with the story alternating between first-person chapters from Grace’s point of view, locked up in jail, and third-person chapters following Dr Simon Jordan, a fictional young doctor researching Grace’s case, meeting with her regularly to try and tease out her memories and reconcile the woman he sees with the brutal murders.

‘I have of course fictionalised historical events (as did many commentators on this case who claimed to be writing history),’ writes Atwood in an afterword to Alias Grace. ‘I have not changed any known facts, although the written accounts are so contradictory that few facts emerge as unequivocally ‘known’… Where mere hints and outright gaps exist in the records, I have felt free to invent.’

In doing so, Atwood has sought to focus less on the murders of Kinnear and Montgomery, and more on the ways in which Grace is viewed by society and the ways in which her story is coloured – for herself and others – by the fact that she is a pretty, young woman. ‘The combination of sex, violence, and the deplorable insubordination of the lower classes was most attractive’ to journalists writing about Grace, writes Atwood in the afterword. She counters some of this hysteria around Grace’s story by encouraging readers to think for themselves about Grace’s actions, her fate and her guilt.

Alias Grace, which was adapted as a Netflix series in 2017, has many admirers for its unsentimental and clear-eyed storytelling, among them the late Hilary Mantel, who described the novel as ‘brilliant’ and wrote in a piece for the Literary Review: ‘The book brims with ideas, expressed through the narrative with subtlety but no obscurity. Atwood has no need to be obscure. She is formidably intelligent, and a formidably accomplished novelist.’

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If you want to see a master at work

With a writer as consistently excellent as Atwood, it’s hard to hone in on a ‘best’ book, but The Blind Assassin would stand a good chance of taking that title in a book-on-book fight.

It follows Iris, a writer in her 80’s, who is looking back on her life, trying to write down her story before she dies and hoping it can lead her to a reconciliation with her estranged daughter, Sabrina. Interspersed with Iris’ story (in the present and the past) is The Blind Assassin, a novel by Iris’ sister Laura, published posthumously in the 1940’s after Laura died by suicide, a tragedy which confirms Laura’s cult status as a writer.

The story-within-a-story conceit speaks to Atwood’s love of books about writers, writing and storytelling, and enables her to explore familial love and rifts, as well as Gothic traditions. What it mostly does, though, is show Atwood’s mastery over different genres and forms, and her ability to hold together multiple strands in an entertaining and accomplished way.

‘Compelling in its lurid way as The Blind Assassin the novelette may be, it pales in comparison to the virtuosic storytelling on display in The Blind Assassin the novel,’ wrote Michiko Kakutani in her review in the New York Times.

It was this virtuosic storytelling that saw Atwood win the first of her two Booker Prizes, in 2000, as well as pick up a host of other awards and nominations, and it’s what should make you want to pick up this novel.