Alias Grace

Based on a real nineteenth-century Canadian case, this novel follows Grace Marks, a young Irish immigrant servant convicted in connection with a double murder. Years later she is held in prison, and a doctor interested in the new science of the mind comes to interview her, hoping to understand what she remembers.

As Grace tells her story, the reader is left to weigh memory, class, gender and the limits of anyone's certainty. Atwood draws on period records but invents freely, and she leaves the central question of guilt open. The result is a quiet, absorbing portrait of a woman whom others constantly interpret.