This is the wise, unsettling, drastic story of three women whose lives share a common wound: Zenia, a woman they first met as university students in the sixties. Zenia is smart and beautiful, by turns manipulative, vulnerable and irresistible. She has entered into their separate lives to ensnare their sympathy, betray their trust, and exploit their weaknesses. Now Zenia, thought dead, has suddenly reappeared.

In this richly layered narrative, Atwood skilfully evokes the decades of the past as she retraces three women's lives, until we are back in the present, where it is yet to be discovered whether Zenia's "pure, free-wheeling malevolence" can still wreak havoc.

The Robber Bride reports from the farthest reaches of the sex wars and is one of Margaret Atwood's most intricate and subversive novels yet.