The blind assassin

` Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. ` Thus begins The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood`s stunning new novel. Laura Chases`s older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty . two, is living in Port Ticonderoga , a town dominated by their once . prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister`s tragic death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase, not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following : as Iris says, she herself lives . in the long shadow cast by Laura..