Margaret Atwood

A dazzling collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, stories that look deeply into the heart of family relationships, marriage, loss and memory, and what it means to spend a life together Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the most visionary and canonical authors in the world. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine—explore the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood’s characteristic insight, wit and intellect. The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love—and what comes after. Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.

Stories

Old Babes in the Wood

Laura Dobie

Then she wiped the blood off the kitchen floor and, after a pause, Off the carrot. It was a perfectly good carrot; no need for it to go to waste.

How much waiting we used to do, she thinks. Waiting without knowing. So many blanks we couldn't fill in, so many mysteries. So little information. Now it's the first decade of the twenty-first century, space-time is denser, it's crowded, you can barely move because the air is so packed with this and that. You can't get away from people: they're in touch, they're touching, they're only a touch away. Is that better, or worse?

It hadn't really been about Smudgie. It had been about Tig. She must already have known on some level that he was bound to set sail first, leaving her stranded in the harsh frost, in the waste land, in the cold moonlight.

My father was a pleasant-looking older man, fairly tall, neither obese nor cadaverous--nothing out of the ordinary, which was a disappointment; when you've spent your infancy believing your father has been magically transformed, there are expectations.

"Appearances can be deceptive. She only looks dead."

Csilla's own teeth are childishly small, geometrically even, blamelessly white, and all accounted for, though she must be pushing seventy. She never tells her age, whereas Lynne flourishes hers. Clock up enough years, she's in the habit of saying, and you can dance on a table provided you can still clamber up there. You can have sex with the mailman and nobody will care. You can flush away your push-up bras--not literally, you wouldn't want plumbers involved, asking how the bra got into the toilet-but you get the idea. You don't have to hold in your stomach anymore. You make six kinds of a fool of yourself because you're a fool just for being old. You're off the hook for almost everything.

She'd been an award-winning poet in her extreme youth, by which she means twenty-seven. Poet by its nature is minor, and award- winning is now a common adjective: it might be applied to a beer or a cow. Many of the major celebrities of the 1960s are dead, and Lynne can barely remember who they were, let alone the minor ones. After a while evervthing that was once major is minor.

She checked herself over, starting with the shoes. Bride of Frankenstein shoes, she called them-orthopaedic to the point of despair-but she was well past breaking her neck for vanity. No laces undone; too bad about the puffy ankles, but what could you expect at eighty?

Sharmayne favoured antiques; they gave her nostalgia, an emotion she'd brusquely repressed in midlife but now felt free to indulge.

This cover had been a disaster, according to Leonie. Naturally she'd been attacked by a few academic pedants over the ahistorical lettering, but some ordinary bookstore customers had mistaken Thermidor! for a seafood cookbook with an emphasis on lobsters--the favourite crustacean of Toulouse-Lautrec--and were upset to be confronted with a drawing of Olympe de Gouges being guillotined for demanding liberty, equality, and fraternity for women, a full-colour painting of Robespierre as he was shot in the face, and an etching of vengeful counter-revolutionaries massacring Jacobin prisoners with sabres, cudgels, and pistols. What sort of bloodthirsty monster was she, to be interested in such depraved material?

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