Recommendations
Books Like The Blind Assassin
Best books to read after The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is the Booker Prize-winning nested narrative — Iris Chase, a novel-within-the-novel, and a science fiction tale within that. These recommendations continue the Atwood canon, explore the tradition of the literary novel with intricate nested structure, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel about a woman who has buried the most important truths of her life.
- 1Buy
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
The essential companion Atwood — Offred's account of the theocratic Republic of Gilead, the novel that made Atwood's international reputation; the most widely read of her books and the best introduction to her interest in female survival, historical allegory, and unreliable female narrators.
- 2Buy
Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood
The companion historical Atwood — Grace Marks, the nineteenth-century Canadian murderess, telling her story to a doctor investigating her case; shares The Blind Assassin's interest in an elderly woman narrator whose true account of her own life remains forever uncertain.
- 3Buy
Cat's Eye
by Margaret Atwood
The companion autobiographical Atwood — Elaine Risley, a Toronto painter returning for a retrospective, recovering memories of her childhood friendship with Cordelia; shares The Blind Assassin's retrospective female narrator and its interest in the violence that women do to each other and the impossibility of escaping the past.
- 4Buy
The Testaments
by Margaret Atwood
The sequel to The Handmaid's Tale — three female narrators including Aunt Lydia, telling the story of Gilead's eventual fall; winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 and the companion for readers who want more Atwood after The Blind Assassin.
- 5Buy
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
The companion in the tradition of the literary novel about retrospective narration and the question of whether a narrator can be trusted — Briony Tallis narrating a lifetime of atonement for what she did to her sister and Robbie; shares The Blind Assassin's structure of a woman's retrospective account that conceals as much as it reveals.
- 6Buy
The French Lieutenant's Woman
by John Fowles
The companion in the tradition of the literary novel with intricate nested narrative structure — Fowles's Victorian romance interrupted by a narrator who discusses his own choices as a novelist; the predecessor in the tradition of the literary novel that foregrounds its own construction while telling an emotionally urgent story.
- 7Buy
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
The companion in the tradition of the literary puzzle-box novel — Brother William investigating murders in a medieval monastery, the novel layered with historical research, textual puzzles, and a mystery whose full meaning only becomes clear at the end; shares The Blind Assassin's quality of a novel whose true structure is only visible in retrospect.
- 8Buy
A Tale for the Time Being
by Ruth Ozeki
The companion in the tradition of the literary novel with a nested diary structure — a novelist on a British Columbia beach finding a diary that may belong to a Japanese teenager on the other side of the Pacific; shares The Blind Assassin's love of nested texts and its interest in how an old woman's written record can reach a reader she will never meet.
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