"If I were to meet Cordelia again, what would I tell her about myself? The truth, or whatever would make me look good? Probably the latter. I still have that need."
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.
'A triumph. An emphatically taut and tender book.' - Marie Claire.
'Not since Graham Greene or William Golding has a novelist captured so forcefully the relationship between school bully and victim... Atwood's power games are played, exquisitely, by little girls.' - Listener
