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Based around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s is wound this tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery. Was Grace Marks a female fiend? A femme fatale? Or a weak and unwilling victim? The accusation of murderess follows her "like a taffeta skirt along the floor".

In the light of these stories, Atwood has been described as 'an outstanding correspondent on the war between sexes (who) writes wittily on the hopes and shortcomings of women who bake for poets, sleep with their accountants, and attribute their preference for awful men to fearlessness'.

Elaine, a painter, returns to Toronto and finds herself overwhelmed by her past - memories of her childhood, betrayals and cruelties surface relentlessly. She must face the spectre of Cordelia who has been her best friend and her tormentor, and who has haunted her for 40 years.

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates she will, like all dissenters, be hanged or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.

What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High Priest of Art? Court Jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and the development of her writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have seen fit to assume, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the book's title: if a writer is to be seen as 'gifted', who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift? Atwood's wide and eclectic reference to other writers, living and dead, is balanced by anecdotes from her own experiences as a writer, both in Canada and on the international scene. The lightness of her touch is underlined by a seriousness about the purpose and the pleasures of writing, and by a deep familiarity with the myths and traditions of western literature.

First published in 1978, Up in the Tree is the story of two children who make their home up in the branches of a tree, where they are free to do whatever they choose. But when the ladder they rely on to get back down again is destroyed, some of their freedom disappears, too, and the children begin to wonder what they might be missing, down amongst the ground dwellers - until they have an ingenious idea, which helps them to decide what they really prefer once and for all!

Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners - a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, the preservation of all species, the tending of the Earth, and the cultivation of bees and organic crops on flat rooftops - has long predicted the Waterless Flood. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have avoided it: the young trapeze-dancer, Ren, locked into the high-end sex club, Scales and Tails; and former SecretBurgers meat-slinger turned Gardener, Toby, barricaded into the luxurious AnooYoo Spa, where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda, or the MaddAddam eco-fighters? Ren's one-time teenage lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the CorpSeCorps, the shadowy and corrupt policing force of the ruling powers Meanwhile, in the natural world, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through a ruined world, singing their devotional hymns and faithful to their creed and to their Saints - Saint Francis Assisi, Saint Rachel Carson, and Saint Al Gore among them - what odds for Ren and Toby, and for the human race? By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most effective.