From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Handmaids Tale
One of Margaret Atwood’s most unforgettable characters lurks at the center of this intricate novel like a spider in a web. The glamorous irresistible unscrupulous Zenia is nothing less than a fairy-tale villain in the memories of her former friends. Roz Charis and Tony - university classmates decades ago - were reunited at Zenia’s funeral and have met monthly for lunch ever since obsessively retracing the destructive swath she once cut through their lives.
A brilliantly inventive fabulist Zenia had a talent for exploiting her friends’ weaknesses wielding intimacy as a weapon and cheating them of money time sympathy and men. But one day five years after her funeral they are shocked to catch sight of Zenia: even her death appears to have been yet another fiction.
As the three women plot to confront their larger-than-life nemesis Atwood proves herself a gleefully acute observer of the treacherous shoals of friendship trust desire and power.