Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
In old age, Iris Chase Griffen recalls growing up with her younger sister, Laura, in an Ontario factory-owning family whose fortune is declining. Her marriage to Toronto businessman Richard Griffen and Laura's death in 1945 frame the family history she records. Interspersed with her memories is a novel published under Laura's name: two secret lovers meet in borrowed rooms, where the man invents a tale about a blind assassin on a distant planet.
Reader notes
Iris's dry, cutting humor punctuates a bleak literary family saga. The nested stories and newspaper clippings require you to assemble the family's public and private histories as you read. Abuse and suicide are serious subjects.
How it reads
Writing style
Atmospheric · Dense · Lyrical · Witty
Tone
Cerebral · Dark · Melancholic · Reflective
Structure
Braided · Framed · Multiple timelines
Driven by
Character · Relationships · Voice
Point of view
Mixed viewpoints
Setting
Port Ticonderoga, Ontario · Toronto
Reading complexity
Writing
4 / 5
Ideas
4 / 5
Structure
5 / 5
Background knowledge
2 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Writing
How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas
How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure
How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge
Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity
Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Themes
Art and creativity
Class
Family
Gender
Knowledge and truth
Memory
Content notes
Violence
Strong
Sexual content
Mild
Swearing
Mild
Substance use
Mild
Abuse
Strong
Self-harm or suicide
Strong
Standing and awards
Canonical
Booker Prize, 2000
International Dublin Literary Award shortlist, 2002
Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist, 2001
Questions readers ask
How long is it?
544 pages in the Anchor Books 2001 paperback edition.
Which edition is shown here?
Anchor Books · 2001 · Paperback. ISBN 9780385720953.
How long does it take to read The Blind Assassin?
About 11 hours at 50 pages an hour, based on the 544-page Anchor Books edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and critic whose work moves between speculative fiction, historical narrative, satire, and mythic revision. She often builds stories from voices that are constrained, compromised, or competing, making narration itself part of the struggle over power. Her prose can be spare and atmospheric or densely layered, with dry wit sharpening its attention to gender, class, language, and political control. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred’s account renders an authoritarian theocracy through the restricted knowledge of a woman assigned to reproductive service. Alias Grace turns interviews with a convicted servant into a contest between measured testimony and a psychiatrist’s demand for explanation. Blind Assassin expands this method through memoir, newspaper reports, and a novel within the novel, each layer revising the others. Elsewhere, Atwood directs the same scrutiny toward biotechnology and social collapse in Oryx and Crake, and toward inherited myth in The Penelopiad, where Penelope’s defense is interrupted by the maids’ disruptive chorus.
