Product Description

Zenia is beautiful, smart and greedy, by turns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless; a man's dream and a woman"s nightmare. She is also dead. Just to make sure Tony, Roz andd Charis are there for the funeral. But five years on, as the three women share an indulgent, sisterly lunch, the unthinkable happens; 'with waves of ill will flowing out of her like cosmic radiation', Zenia is back...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76528 in Books
• Published on: 1994-10-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

Review
'It stirs depths that Cat's Eye did not reach, and grants deeper stronger powers to women's friendship in distress' MARINA WARNER

About the Author
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye and Alias Grace have all been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and now Oryx and Crake for the 2003 Booker prize. She has won many literary prizes in other countries.

Customer Reviews

One of Atwood's best
I loved this book and am suprised by some of the negative comments by other reviewers as i would rate it highly on my Atwood reading list. (Much better than 'Alias Grace')

Reading this, i was really caught up in the tension the characters feel by the fraught memories and possible reunion with Zenia. For me this novel really captured the betrayal and hate that can seep into female 'friendships', much in the same way that Atwood captures the child bully relationship in 'Cat's Eye'. Atwood perfectly articulates the desperate loathing that women will feel for each other, when betrayed by those closest to them, with whom they have shared their deepest feelings.

A really great read that will leave you breathless and desperately waiting for the 'revelation'

I am amazed that no-one has yet reviewed this book!
This is one of my top 10 books ever! (I'll spare you the whole list). If I enjoy a book I am usually disappointed by the conclusion - but in this case the entire book fulfilled the expectations of the first few chapters. The reader (me) could identify with all the main characters, and the villain is delicious in succeeding at all the duplications expected of a woman of 'a certain age' and managing to succeed undetected. As ever, Atwood does not dwell on some idealised 'sisterhood', but acknowledges the support that women can get from their peers without necessarily trusting them wholeheartedly. The whole book fits in with my own experiences, both first hand and vicarious.

Virtuoso chaos
I have just re-read this, one of my very favourite contemporary novels, and consider it to be an extraordinary achievement.
Its major strength surely lies in the highly skilful interlocking of themes and narrative technique and structure. The lives of three different women, Toni, Charis and Roz, have been ransacked in various unsavoury ways by the baleful influence of the mysterious Zenia. The reader is given ample opportunity to see things from the points of view of three characters with highly contrasted personalities and attitudes to life in general, and as a result is gradually led to realise that, while all three women are in many ways likeable, none of them is perhaps one hundred per-cent trustworthy...
Many articles and reviews have set out to establish what "really" happens in this novel, who, if anyone, is "really" responsible for what happens in the end. This surely misses the point, which is that subjective interpretations of "reality" inevitably and by definition clash with and contradict one another. And, after all, perhaps Zenia, like the witches in "Macbeth", doesn't "really" exist as any more than a personification or metaphor of the neuroses, uncertainties and vulnerabilities of the other characters?
Margaret Atwood heaps up the images which correspond to the chaos and fragility of our inner lives, and alludes very deftly to the fact that so much of what we do and how we behave corresponds to largely anarchic impulses, rather than to rational, planned behaviour.
I haven't yet read "Oryx and Crake", but I put this firmly at the top of the list of Atwood's novels. Although it wasn't shortlisted - five of her others have been, including "Oryx and Crake" and "The Blind Assassin", which went on to win in 2000 - this, for me, is the one that really deserved the Booker.