The Blind Assassin
By Margaret Atwood

As you can see I’ve been on a second time round Mar­garet Atwood binge lately.

Luck­ily for us all all her books are emin­ently re-readable, stay­ing as fresh as they were the first time round and really giv­ing you, the reader, a chance to get to grips with what a gif­ted and pro­fes­sional writer Atwood actually is.

(Note:- re-reading is a must for every one. This is how really good books are meas­ured — on your second or third read do they seem bet­ter now for your under­stand­ing of what the author is doing and how they employ nar­rat­ive, lit­er­ary and char­ac­ter­isa­tion tech­niques to tell the story you so loved the first time round? Does the author under­stand what a book should do and how it should func­tion and how is this dis­played in the text? Stuff like that. This is how really good books are — well put together, thought out and oper­at­ing on many, many, many dif­fer­ent levels without fall ing apart under their own ambition.)

The Blind Assas­sin won The Booker Prize by the way. Because it’s pretty damn good. You should read it.