Virago News

To mark the publication of Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Testaments and to celebrate forty years of publishing with Virago – her novel Surfacing was one of the first Virago Modern Classics in 1979 – Virago are publishing on August 22 2019, four of her novels as Collector’s Editions. In paperback at £9.99 in stunning new designs with flaps and foil, these four books: Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin are some of her greatest novels.

When a dead body is found in the Thames, caught in the chains of HMS Belfast, it begins a search for a missing woman and confirms a sense that in London a person can become invisible once outside their community – and that assumes they even have a community. A policeman, a documentary film-maker and an Irish nurse named Chrissie all respond to the death of the unknown woman in their own ways. London is a place of random meetings, shifting relationships – and some, like Chrissie intersect with many. The film-maker and the policeman meanwhile have safe homes with wives – or do they? An immigrant family speaks their own language only privately; they have managed to integrate – or have they? The wonderful Linda Grant weaves a tale around ideas of home; how London can be a place of exile or expulsion, how home can be a physical place or an idea. How all our lives intersect and how coincidence or the randomness of birth place can decide how we live and with whom.