Summoned from the city to search for her father on a remote lake in northern Quebec, a commercial artist in her twenties, cool, attractive, the remorse-less anti-heroine of contemporary urban culture, journeys into the Canadian wilderness of her childhood with three companions: Joe, her lover — "from the side he's like the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy, blunt-snouted"; David, a glib secondhand "pastiche, layers of handbills, pages from magazines"; David's wife Anna, fighting for her life, her only weapon a blend of makeup and lotions. Set apart from her companions by her insights into their pretensions, the heroine begins her search for survival, tracking down the mysterious clues among her father's papers which convince her he is lurking deep in the woods, demented, watching them . . . leading to a climax as devastating and harrowing to the reader as to the narrator. A brilliant and passionate novel, Surfacing catapults Margaret Atwood into the ranks of writers such as Joseph Conrad and James Dickey.