
Book of Lives
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed

Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pre-order for $16.38
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
By:
-
Margaret Atwood
About this listen
How does one of the greatest storytellers of our time write her own life? The long-awaited memoir from one of our most lauded and influential cultural figures.
‘Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.’
Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents – entomologist father, dietician mother – Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: 'It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn.’), but also thrilling and beautiful.
From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat’s Eye to the Orwellian 1980s Berlin where she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.
As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations.
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
We Did Ok, Kid
- A Memoir
- By: Sir Anthony Hopkins
- Narrated by: Sir Anthony Hopkins
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born and raised in Port Talbot—a small Welsh steelworks town—amid war and depression, Sir Anthony Hopkins grew up around men who were tough, to say the least, and eschewed all forms of emotional vulnerability in favor of alcoholism and brutality. A struggling student in school, he was deemed by his peers, his parents, and other adults as a failure with no future ahead of him. But, on a fateful Saturday night, the disregarded Welsh boy watched the 1948 adaptation of Hamlet, sparking a passion for acting that would lead him on a path that no one could have predicted.
-
Paper Boat
- New and Selected Poems: 1961-2023
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margaret Atwood
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tracing the legacy of Margaret Atwood—a writer who has fundamentally shaped the contemporary literary landscapes—Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2023 assembles Atwood’s most vital poems in one essential volume. In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful, and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voice to remarkably drawn characters—mythological figures, animals, and everyday people—all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own.
By: Margaret Atwood
-
My Evil Mother
- A Short Story
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Life is hard enough for a teenage girl in 1950s suburbia without having a mother who may—or may not—be a witch. A single mother at that. Sure, she fits in with her starched dresses, string of pearls, and floral aprons. Then there are the hushed and mystical consultations with neighborhood women in distress. The unsavory, mysterious plants in the flower beds. The divined warning to steer clear of a boyfriend whose fate is certainly doomed.
-
-
Great easy read
- By Fundamental I. on 04-02-22
By: Margaret Atwood
-
Wilderness Tips
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Jennifer Vuletic
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In each of these tales, Margaret Atwood deftly illuminates the single instant that shapes a whole life: In a few brief minutes we watch as characters progress from the vulnerabilities of adolescence through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age. By superimposing the past on the present, Atwood paints interior landscapes shaped by time, regret, and life's lost chances, endowing even the banal with a sense of mystery.
-
-
It all blends together
- By P. Thorsbakken on 02-21-21
By: Margaret Atwood
-
The Handmaid's Tale: Special Edition
- By: Margaret Atwood, Valerie Martin - essay
- Narrated by: Claire Danes, full cast, Margaret Atwood, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After a violent coup in the United States overthrows the Constitution and ushers in a new government regime, the Republic of Gilead imposes subservient roles on all women. Offred, now a Handmaid tasked with the singular role of procreation in the childless household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost everything, even her own name.
-
-
Wait! It Mightn't Be What You Think--
- By Gillian on 04-05-17
By: Margaret Atwood, and others
-
Oryx and Crake
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Campbell Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly?
-
-
Brilliant Science Fiction
- By Michael on 05-20-03
By: Margaret Atwood
-
We Did Ok, Kid
- A Memoir
- By: Sir Anthony Hopkins
- Narrated by: Sir Anthony Hopkins
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born and raised in Port Talbot—a small Welsh steelworks town—amid war and depression, Sir Anthony Hopkins grew up around men who were tough, to say the least, and eschewed all forms of emotional vulnerability in favor of alcoholism and brutality. A struggling student in school, he was deemed by his peers, his parents, and other adults as a failure with no future ahead of him. But, on a fateful Saturday night, the disregarded Welsh boy watched the 1948 adaptation of Hamlet, sparking a passion for acting that would lead him on a path that no one could have predicted.
-
Paper Boat
- New and Selected Poems: 1961-2023
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margaret Atwood
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tracing the legacy of Margaret Atwood—a writer who has fundamentally shaped the contemporary literary landscapes—Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2023 assembles Atwood’s most vital poems in one essential volume. In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful, and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voice to remarkably drawn characters—mythological figures, animals, and everyday people—all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own.
By: Margaret Atwood
-
My Evil Mother
- A Short Story
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Life is hard enough for a teenage girl in 1950s suburbia without having a mother who may—or may not—be a witch. A single mother at that. Sure, she fits in with her starched dresses, string of pearls, and floral aprons. Then there are the hushed and mystical consultations with neighborhood women in distress. The unsavory, mysterious plants in the flower beds. The divined warning to steer clear of a boyfriend whose fate is certainly doomed.
-
-
Great easy read
- By Fundamental I. on 04-02-22
By: Margaret Atwood
-
Wilderness Tips
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Jennifer Vuletic
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In each of these tales, Margaret Atwood deftly illuminates the single instant that shapes a whole life: In a few brief minutes we watch as characters progress from the vulnerabilities of adolescence through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age. By superimposing the past on the present, Atwood paints interior landscapes shaped by time, regret, and life's lost chances, endowing even the banal with a sense of mystery.
-
-
It all blends together
- By P. Thorsbakken on 02-21-21
By: Margaret Atwood
-
The Handmaid's Tale: Special Edition
- By: Margaret Atwood, Valerie Martin - essay
- Narrated by: Claire Danes, full cast, Margaret Atwood, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After a violent coup in the United States overthrows the Constitution and ushers in a new government regime, the Republic of Gilead imposes subservient roles on all women. Offred, now a Handmaid tasked with the singular role of procreation in the childless household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost everything, even her own name.
-
-
Wait! It Mightn't Be What You Think--
- By Gillian on 04-05-17
By: Margaret Atwood, and others
-
Oryx and Crake
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Campbell Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly?
-
-
Brilliant Science Fiction
- By Michael on 05-20-03
By: Margaret Atwood