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  • Published: 4 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784744496
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 752
  • RRP: $69.99
Categories:

Book of Lives

A Memoir of Sorts





The life and times of one of the most important writers of our time, from her peripatetic childhood in the Canadian far north, through the writing of The Handmaid's Tale, to her position today as revered truth-teller and literary icon

How does one of the greatest storytellers of our time write her own life? The long-awaited memoir from one of our most lauded and influential cultural figures

‘Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.’

Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents – entomologist father, dietician mother – Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: 'It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn.’), but also thrilling and beautiful.

From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat’s Eye to divided 1980s Berlin where she began The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.

As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations.

  • Published: 4 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784744496
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 752
  • RRP: $69.99
Categories:

About the author

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against the disempowerment of women, and with the 2017 release of the award-winning Channel 4 TV series. Its sequel, The Testaments, was published in 2019 and was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize.

Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

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Praise for Book of Lives

I'd walk across hot coals to speak alongside Mina Smallman... An amazing woman

Jess Phillips, MP

Mina Smallman is all of us, except she's stronger than most of us

Dawn Butler, MP

Mina Smallman is as tough as she is warm

The Guardian

A strong, outspoken and eloquent activist

Daily Mail