Margaret Atwood Novel Novels & Stories

She wrote until there wasn't a fairy tale lie she couldn't expose anymore. "The End," she wrote at the last page of her novel. Cathedra climbed atop her desk chair and hung a noose over the beams. She tied a knot firmly, making sure it was strong enough to fulfill its purpose. She slipped the knot over her head. She jumped and kicked the chair off. For a few minutes she struggled and fought for breath, the way humans were normally programmed to do. For a few minutes, she had enough time to reflect on her short-lived life.

Margaret knelt in front of the fireplace with the grimoire laid out in front of her, chanting the incantations within as she looked at herself in the mirror. “Ella!” I surged forward, but it was too late. Two warriors burst in after me and tackled me to the floor, knocking the breath from my lungs so hard that I began coughing. My chest burned with the force of the coughs, wet, mucusy blood splattering across the hardwood floor. Margaret’s chanting grew in volume. The fire flickered. Julie stepped back and handed Margaret the knife. Blood dripped from the tip onto the open page of the book, and suddenly…

"Look at that. They're already talking about book deals. Movie rights. This story has everything. Betrayal, stolen dreams, a brilliant woman's fight for justice." I watched Allen's arrest photo flash across the screen. I felt nothing but a strange, yawning emptiness where satisfaction should have been. Margaret's voice softened slightly as she settled beside me on our familiar sofa. "Revenge is a dish best served cold, darling. How does it taste?"

She’d lived her life chasing something she could never have, and now she’d spend eternity trapped in the consequences of that chase. The Council dismissed. Guards were posted outside Sarah’s cell. Life, somehow, continued. I found myself walking back to the nursery without consciously deciding to go there. My feet just carried me toward the one pure thing in this entire mess. Margaret. She was sleeping when I arrived, her tiny chest rising and falling steadily. The monitors showed improving numbers. She was going to survive. Against all odds, despite being born weeks early from a mother who’d wished her dead, Margaret was fighting and winning.

Margaret resided in a quaint cottage on the edge of town, a hidden gem nestled amidst a lush garden bursting with vibrant flowers. Knocking on the weathered wooden door, Emma's heart raced with anticipation. Moments later, the door creaked open, revealing a stooped figure with wisps of gray hair framing a kind face. Margaret's eyes, age-weathered and filled with wisdom, peered at Emma through a veil of time. "Can I help you, dear?" Margaret asked, her voice carrying a sense of familiarity and warmth. "Mrs. Margaret, my name is Emma Reynolds, and I'm a journalist for the Silverwood Gazette," Emma began, her voice filled with earnestness and respect.

"Margaret, please, take a deep breath. It's alright... Everyone is just fine. Everyone will be just fine." I watched her nails retract to their normal length, and I swallowed the bit of anxiety welling in me. Margaret lost her family in a house fire that had been set on purpose years ago by someone she thought was her friend. I don't know what happened to that man, but she lost her husband, her children, her family home, and nearly her life that night. "He didn't start the fire on purpose." Margaret's jaw twitched, and she turned. "He certainly didn't ensure that it wouldn't happen either. Idiot."

It rang again immediately. Then again. Finally, I answered. “What?” “So it’s true,” Margaret snapped without greeting me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Don’t play games with me.” “I don’t have time for this.” “You spent the night with Adrian’s ex-wife.” I remained silent. She took my silence as confirmation. “Have you completely lost your mind?” “Careful.” “She’ll destroy this family.” “This family destroyed her.” Margaret scoffed. “She was never worthy of becoming a Blackwood.”

“And because I didn’t, they watched the bus stop.” Daniel did not answer. That was because there was no safe answer. Leah pressed one hand to her stomach. Margaret’s trap was not a single action. It was a net. Leah could move through one opening only to feel another string tighten somewhere else. She had not turned toward Noah in the hospital, and still Noah had been seen enough to matter. Or perhaps he had already mattered. Perhaps the car had been there before Westbridge. Perhaps Leah’s call had been enough. Perhaps Margaret had known everything from the beginning.

Georgia said, and her voice had changed now, gone low and careful in a way that frightened me more than her earlier horror had. She was right. The further we read, the clearer it became that Georgia and I were not the beginning of this story, however much it had felt, for both of us, like the whole of our lives had started the day each of us was taken. There were other names in those pages, earlier entries, dates stretching back further than either of us had been alive to witness. A woman named Margaret, mentioned across a dozen entries before her name simply stopped appearing at all, the final mention nothing but a cold, clinical line that made my stomach turn entirely. Margaret proved unsu

“There are things about the pregnancy—the hopeful one that may come after everything resolves—that aren’t coincidence. Margaret pulled strings even from prison. A final act of sabotage or manipulation. But it hasn’t worked the way she wanted. Not yet.” My hand moved instinctively to my abdomen. The loss we had mourned. The new possibility that felt like both miracle and trap while the proceedings were still ongoing. Adrian’s breath caught behind me. His fingers flexed against my back, that slow, soothing circle returning—gentle, aching, full of everything he couldn’t say here. “I don’t remember everything,” I whispered. “But my body does. There are moments… fragments of intimacy I can’t plac