Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood · b. 1939 · Canada

Why it matters

A convicted Irish servant, either murderer or victim of a horrifying miscarriage of justice, tells her story to a doctor probing her memory in 1859 Ontario. Atwood reconstructs a real, unsolved double murder as an unreliable true-crime narration.

At a glance

An unreliable narrator and layered testimony leave the central crime deliberately unresolved.