Joan Foster is a woman with numerous identities and a talent for shedding them at will. She has written trashy gothic romances, had affairs with a Polish count and an absurd avant-garde artist, and played at being a politically engaged partner to her activist husband.
After a volume of her poetry becomes an unexpected literary sensation, her new fame attracts a blackmailer threatening to reveal her secrets. Joan's response is to fake her own death and flee to a hill town in Italy.
Studded with hair-raising comic escapades and piercing psychological insights, Lady Oracle is both hilarious and profound.
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
"Brilliant and funny. I can't tell you how exhilarating it was to read it--everything works. An extraordinary book." --Joan Didion
"A very funny novel, lightly told with wry detachment and considerable art." --The Washington Post Book World
"Funny, poignant, and briskly energetic." --Newsweek