Alias Grace - Hardcover

Atwood, Margaret Eleanor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385475713 ISBN 13: 9780385475716

Publisher: Doubleday, 1996

Synopsis

Takes readers into the life and mind of Grace Marks, one of the most notorious women of the 1840s, who is serving a life sentence for murders she claims she cannot remember. 200,000 first printing. $200,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

Review:

In 1843, a 16-year-old Canadian housemaid named Grace Marks was tried for the murder of her employer and his mistress. The sensationalistic trial made headlines throughout the world, and the jury delivered a guilty verdict. Yet opinion remained fiercely divided about Marks- -was she a spurned woman who had taken out her rage on two innocent victims, or was she an unwilling victim herself, caught up in a crime she was too young to understand? Such doubts persuaded the judges to commute her sentence to life imprisonment, and Marks spent the next 30 years in an assortment of jails and asylums, where she was often exhibited as a star attraction. In Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood reconstructs Marks's story in fictional form. Her portraits of 19th-century prison and asylum life are chilling in their detail. The author also introduces Dr Simon Jordan, who listens to the prisoner's tale with a mixture of sympathy and disbelief. In his effort to uncover the truth, Jordan uses the tools of the then rudimentary science of psychology. But the last word belongs to the book's narrator--Grace herself.

Review:

A sensuous, perplexing book, at once sinister and dignified, grubby and gorgeous, panoramic yet specific...I don't think I have ever been so thrilled...This, surely is as far as a novel can go (Julie Myerson, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY)

Brilliant...Atwood's prose is searching. So intimate it seems to be written on the skin (Hilary Mantel)

Margaret Atwood is to be congratulated (Anita Brookner, SPECTATOR)

The outstanding novelist of our age (Peter Kemp, SUNDAY TIMES)

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0385475713
• ISBN 13: 9780385475716
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 468