Book Corner - Adult fiction

	by Margaret Atwood
	Hardcover - 521 pages (26 September, 2000) Amazon's Price: £8.49 You Save: £8.50 (50%)

"It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward," writes Margaret Atwood, towards the end of her impressive and complex new novel, The Blind Assassin. It's a melancholic account of why writers write--and readers read--and one that frames the different lives told through this book. The Blind Assassin is (at least) two novels. At the end of her life, Iris Griffen takes up her pen to record the secret history of her family, the romantic melodrama of its decline and fall between the two World Wars. Conjuring a world of prosperity and misery, marriage and loneliness, the central enigma of Iris's tale is the death of her sister, Laura Chase, who "drove a car off a bridge" at the end of the Second World War. Suicide or accident? The story gradually unfolds, interspersed with sketches of Iris's present-day life--confined by age and ill-health--and a second novel, The Blind Assassin by Laura Chase. Allowing a glimpse into a clandestine love affair between a privileged young woman and a radical "agitator" on the run, this version of The Blind Assassin is an overt act of seduction: the exchange of sex and story about an imaginary world of Sakiel-Norn (a play with the potential, and convention, of fantasy and sci-fi).

	by Patricia Cornwell
	Hardcover - 449 pages (13 October, 2000) Amazon's Price: £8.49 You Save: £8.50 (50%)

What is peculiarly impressive about Patricia Cornwell's new addition to her popular series about the pathologist Kay Scarpetta, The Last Precinct , is that it is a book in which everything is up for grabs and all is at stake. Murders we thought settled for good in previous books, with guilt allocated and people arrested or killed, suddenly come bubbling to the surface again. Kay herself finds herself accused of the killing of difficult Deputy Police Chief Diane Bray, and of framing the deformed psychopath who killed Diane and burst into Kay's home with murderous intent. Even the hideous death of Kay's lover Benton, several books ago, turns out to have been more complicated than we thought. Kay finds herself in jeopardy several times over with her headstrong lesbian niece, her only entirely reliable ally. This is a book in which Cornwell takes her heroine into new areas--we get the same amount of complicated forensic lore, but there is a new personal urgency to it, a sense that detection is not a game. Kay's relationships with colleagues have always been prickly, but here they become more problematic than ever before; Cornwell's admirers will be pleased by this, her most tense and nervy book for years.

	by Iain M. Banks
	Hardcover - 357 pages (10 August, 2000) Amazon's Price: £10.19 You Save: £6.80 (40%)

It was one of the less glorious incidents of a long-ago war. It led to the destruction of two suns and the billions of lives they supported. Now, 800 years later, the light from those first ancient deaths has reached the Culture's Orbital called Masaq'. For the Hub Mind, overseer of the massive bracelet world, its arrival is particularly poignant. But it still may be eclipsed by events from the cultures more recent past.

When the Chelgrian Ziller, a composer of galactic renown living in self-imposed exile on Masaq', learns that an emissary from his home is being sent to the orbital, he fears what he assumes to be the worst, that the Chelgrians want him to return. But the composer is far from being the only thing on the Chelgrian emissary's mind. His mission has another purpose; one so secret he does not know it himself at first. Discovering its nature will take him on a journey into his past and the haunting memories of another terrible war whose legacy threatens to be much more than just an unfortunate diplomatic incident.