Alias Grace is based on the true story, well known in Atwood’s Canada, of the murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in 1843. Atwood focuses mainly on one of the accused murderers, Grace Marks, a servant in Kinnear’s household along with James Montgomery, who was hanged for the murders while Grace was sentenced to life.  

The 2010s were a hugely significant decade for the Booker, largely due to the shift in rules which came into place in 2014. From that year onwards, the Prize was open to all novels published in the English language, replacing the long-held (and many might say, dated) criteria that focused on authors of British, Irish and Commonwealth heritage. This shift led to a lot of hand-wringing and fretting about the potential “domination” of the Prize by US authors, and a dilution of what the Prize stood for.

The Handmaid’s Tale, for anyone who’s been living under a rock and is somehow not familiar with its plot, is essentially the tale of a dystopian, totalitarian version of America, known as Gilead, seen through the eyes of one of its presumably millions of ordinary female victims - Offred - who, as one of the diminishing number of fertile women in an aggressively patriarchal society, is assigned to the role of “handmaid”, essentially a house-slave of her “commander” whose sole purpose is to bear him and his wife a child.

The Booker in the Nineties was all big ideas, grand narratives and excess, a decade distilled in book form under the glare of the tabloid press. In some sense this held true as the new millennium rolled over… and it some senses, well, it didn’t at all. As in the rest of life, and culture, the Booker in the Noughties felt more fragmented. More individual stories shining a light on hitherto ignored groups, but with the dominant Bookerati never too far around the corner.

The Blind Assassin contains three layers of narrative (all, it seems, titled The Blind Assassin.) The main story is realist novel with a grand historical sweep across major events of Canadian and world history, narrated by Iris Chase-Griffen, from the vantage point of the present day and addressed to her one surviving granddaughter. In this narrative, she reflects on her life and especially her relationship with her sister Laura, who died in a (presumably deliberate) car crash 10 days after the end of the Second World War. We also learn that her husband, the businessman and aspiring politician Richard Griffen, drowned shortly afterwards.