'Lady Oracle' is an early novel by Margaret Atwood, first published in 1976. I hadn't heard of the book when I started reading it and had no idea what to expect. I found the opening chapters, in which the narrator arrives at her holiday home in Italy, having apparently faked her own death, quite confusing, but once she started to tell the story of her childhood in Toronto the novel grabbed my attention. With hindsight it was fun coming to this tale without any prior knowledge of it, so I won't give much away here. I enjoyed the book but I still feel a bit unsure what I thought of it. On the face of it, its quite a miserable story - but it is told with a comic flair and boasts a cast of brilliantly eccentric characters (who all seem to have the habit of reappearing just when you had forgotten them!). 'Lady Oracle' does have the feel of an early work, perhaps throwing too many ideas into the mix. But it is clearly written by a skillful author - and the fact that the first person narrator is also a novelist makes it hard to know how much of her account of her life we should believe. An intriguing and entertaining read.
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