READING LIST · LISANNE SWART
Best Books by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood has written seventeen novels. Not all of them are essential. Some are experiments that did not fully resolve. Some are brilliant but not where you should start. These seven are the ones that matter most — the books that show what she can do at full power, the ones I would give someone who wanted to understand why she has been one of the most important writers alive for fifty years. They are not in publication order. They are in the order that makes sense.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction · Updated June 2026
The Handmaid’s Tale
The Republic of Gilead has replaced the United States. Women have been stripped of their names, their property, their right to read. Offred is a Handmaid — her only sanctioned function is to bear children for the Commander and his wife. The novel is told entirely from inside her constrained, careful, survival-minded perspective. Atwood wrote it in Berlin in 1984, and used no invention she could not source in recorded history. Nothing in it was made up.
Start here, even if you have seen the television series. The book is a completely different experience — quieter, more interior, more ambiguous. The TV adaptation amplified the horror. Atwood’s version is about what it feels like to live inside that horror and still try to hold onto yourself. The ending has been debated for forty years. Read it and form your own view.
Find on Amazon →Alias Grace
Grace Marks is in prison for the murder of her employer and his housekeeper. It is 1843, and a young psychiatrist has been hired to determine whether Grace is sane, guilty, or something more complicated. The novel is based on a real case, meticulously researched. Grace tells her story in fragments, and the reader is never entirely sure what to believe. Atwood holds the ambiguity so steadily that by the end you realize it is the point, not a withholding.
This is Atwood at her most controlled and most unsettling. The question of whether Grace is manipulating the psychiatrist, performing innocence, or genuinely unable to access her own memory becomes a question about how women survive, how they are read, and how the truth gets buried under other people’s interpretations. It is historical fiction that feels completely contemporary. One of the best novels she has written.
Find on Amazon →The Blind Assassin
Two sisters. A dead woman’s memoir. A pulp science fiction story being told in secret between two people having an affair. A family history that slowly reveals what destroyed it. The structure is deliberately layered — you are reading at least three texts simultaneously and the connections between them emerge slowly. It won the Booker Prize and it is the novel that proved Atwood’s ambition was not limited to a single register.
The Blind Assassin rewards patience in a way few novels do. The pleasure of it is cumulative: what seems like ornamentation turns out to be load-bearing, and the final act reframes everything that came before. It is also, beneath the formal complexity, a deeply felt novel about what women sacrifice and what gets taken from them, told by a narrator who has spent a lifetime not quite being allowed to tell the truth.
Find on Amazon →Oryx and Crake
Snowman may be the last human alive. He lives near a group of gentle, engineered beings called the Crakers, and in flashbacks we learn what happened: how a brilliant, reckless man named Crake, working inside the biotech corporations that have replaced governments, brought about the end of the human species. It is the first book in the MaddAddam trilogy, and the best of the three. The world Atwood builds is not far from the one we are building now.
Atwood insists this is not science fiction but “speculative fiction” — everything in it extrapolated from existing science and corporate logic. That insistence matters. Oryx and Crake is not a warning about a distant future. It is a diagnosis of a present direction. The relationship between Snowman and Crake is one of the most interesting in her work: a study in how brilliance without ethics produces catastrophe, and how ordinary people enable it.
Find on Amazon →Cat’s Eye
Elaine Risley is a painter returning to Toronto for a retrospective of her work. The novel moves between her present and her childhood, specifically the years when a group of girls — led by the quietly terrifying Cordelia — subjected her to a sustained campaign of psychological cruelty that she did not have the vocabulary to name at the time. It is a novel about female friendship, cruelty, memory, and the ways childhood shapes the art we make for the rest of our lives.
This is the most personal of Atwood’s novels and the one least concerned with political allegory. The portrait of girlhood cruelty — the specific, invisible, deniable kind that leaves no marks — is so accurate it is uncomfortable to read. Atwood does not sentimentalize or resolve it. Elaine never entirely recovers, and the novel is honest about that. It is also the book where Atwood’s prose is at its most exact and its most beautiful.
Find on Amazon →The Testaments
Thirty-four years after The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood returned to Gilead. Three narrators: a girl growing up inside it, a girl growing up outside it who does not yet know she is connected to it, and Aunt Lydia — the most feared woman in the regime — writing in secret. The Testaments won the Booker Prize and became a global bestseller. It is more plot-driven than The Handmaid’s Tale, more willing to offer resolution. Readers who wanted answers got them.
Aunt Lydia is the reason to read this book. She is one of the great morally complex characters in recent fiction: a woman who chose complicity in order to survive, who has been wielding that complicity as a long game, and who is finally making her move. The question Atwood asks through her is harder than anything in the first book: what do you owe the world when you made yourself into a monster in order to stay alive?
Find on Amazon →The Robber Bride
Three women — Tony, Charis, and Roz — meet for lunch and realize that Zenia, a woman they had all believed to be dead, has just walked into the restaurant. Zenia destroyed each of them, in different ways, at different times. The novel is told in alternating sections as each woman reconstructs what Zenia did and tries to understand how she let it happen. Zenia herself remains opaque throughout. We never see her from the inside. We only see what she leaves behind.
The Robber Bride is Atwood’s sharpest comedy and her most forensic study of female rivalry. Zenia functions as a kind of dark mirror — she does openly and without shame what the other three women have been trained to want but not to show. The novel asks uncomfortable questions about what women do to each other, and why, without offering a clean answer. It is also genuinely funny, which Atwood does not always get credit for being.
Find on Amazon →Where to start with Margaret Atwood
If you have never read her and want to understand why she matters
→ Start with The Handmaid’s Tale. Even if you have seen the series. The book is quieter, more interior, and more ambiguous — and the ending is different in a way that changes what the whole novel means.
If you want her at her most formally ambitious
→ Read The Blind Assassin. Give it fifty pages before you decide anything. The structure earns itself.
If you want something that feels closest to the present moment
→ Read Oryx and Crake. The biotech corporations, the gated compounds, the engineered extinction — it gets less speculative every year.
If you want the one that is least like what people expect from her
→ Read Cat’s Eye. No dystopia, no allegory. Just a painter trying to understand what her childhood did to her. It is the most human thing she has written.
Frequently asked questions about Margaret Atwood’s books
What is Margaret Atwood’s best book?
It depends on what you want from her. The Handmaid’s Tale is her most famous and the one that established her internationally, but it is not necessarily her most accomplished. Many readers and critics consider Alias Grace or The Blind Assassin to be stronger novels — more controlled, more formally ambitious, more willing to sit with ambiguity. Cat’s Eye is her most personal. If I had to choose one that showed everything she can do, it would be Alias Grace.
Should I read The Handmaid’s Tale before The Testaments?
Yes. The Testaments is a sequel and assumes you know the world of Gilead. More importantly, the emotional weight of The Testaments depends on what you already know and feel about the first book. Reading them in order also lets you see what Atwood chose to answer and what she deliberately left unresolved the first time.
Is the MaddAddam trilogy worth reading in full?
Oryx and Crake is essential. The second book, The Year of the Flood, retells some of the same events from different perspectives and adds depth to the world without advancing the plot much. The third, MaddAddam, resolves the trilogy but is the weakest of the three. If you loved Oryx and Crake, continue. If you are more interested in Atwood’s standalone work, you do not need to.
Is Margaret Atwood’s writing feminist?
Yes, but not in a simple or sloganeering way. Atwood is interested in power — who has it, who is denied it, how it gets maintained, and what people do to survive inside it. Women are often at the center of that analysis because the power dynamics around gender are ones she has studied closely her whole life. But she does not write heroines. She writes complicated people, and some of the most damaging characters in her novels are women. That complexity is what makes her work last.
Which Margaret Atwood book should I read if I liked The Handmaid’s Tale?
If you liked the political allegory and the world-building, read Oryx and Crake — different setting, same precision about how societies collapse. If you liked the female protagonist navigating a system designed to erase her, read Alias Grace — a nineteenth-century woman in an impossible position, just as carefully observed. If you want to stay in Gilead, read The Testaments next.
More from the shelf
Reading list
Best Fiction Books of All Time
The novels that have earned their permanent place.
Reading list
Books by Female Authors
Fiction and nonfiction by women whose work I keep returning to.
Reading list
Books Every Woman Should Read
The books that expand what it means to be a woman in the world.
Reading list
Books Like Poor Things
Literary fiction that reinvents the woman’s story from the inside out.
From the bookshelf
“A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood
If this list resonated with you, you'll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations