Elaine Risley, a painter, returns to Toronto to find herself overwhelmed by her past. Memories of childhood – unbearable betrayals and cruelties – surface relentlessly, forcing her to confront the spectre of Cordelia, once her best friend and tormentor, who has haunted her for forty years. ‘Not since Graham Greene has a novelist captured so forcefully the relationship between school bully and victim…Atwood’s games are played, exquisitely, by little girls’ LISTENER An exceptional novel from the winner of the 2000 Booker Prize