The Best Margaret Atwood Books, Ranked—From 'The Handmaid's Tale' to 'Alias Grace'

Atwood fans have mixed opinions on this novel, and specifically its somewhat chaotic ending—but it’s still very much worth a read, if only to add your own opinion to the conversation. Set in one of Atwood’s signature near-future dystopias, this one features a social experiment in which law-abiding citizens and criminals go 50-50 on a stable suburban life, taking turns living either in a home or a prison every other month. In turn, the concept allows for a fascinating exploration of how humanity persists even in the bleakest, most desperate circumstances.

This unputdownable novel delves into both the complex bonds of female friendship and the push-and-pull of power between men and women. As the book goes on, a trio of friends brought together after another woman, Zenia, stole each of their partners, tell the stories of their interactions with Zenia, peeling back layers of deception and attempting to unravel the true intent of Zenia’s seeming betrayals. 

One of Atwood’s earliest works, Lady Oracle is both hilarious and surprisingly intense in its look at the lies we tell ourselves and others to craft an identity. It follows Joan, a woman whose many lives—as a romance writer, a mistress to powerful men, and a devoted wife—all threaten to come crashing down after she achieves sudden literary fame.

More than three decades after The Handmaid’s Tale took the world by storm, Atwood finally followed it up with a sequel in 2019 that ultimately earned her a second Booker Prize and was brought to life as a Hulu series starting in 2026. The Testaments takes place 15 years after the events of its predecessor, switching between a trio of women’s perspectives to trace a thorough history of the patriarchal theocracy of Gilead.

Feminist retellings of ancient myths have become a popular subgenre in recent years, and Atwood, of course, was ahead of the curve with this 2005 entry in the canon. It tells Penelope’s side of The Odyssey, from her early family life through her husband Odysseus’s long absence on his famous journey, with interludes from a chorus made up of the 12 maids whom Odysseus ordered to be killed upon his return.

Yet another of Atwood’s works to be adapted for the screen, Alias Grace was turned into a Netflix miniseries in 2017. The novel and show offer a fictionalized version of the late 19th-century murders of a Canadian man and his housekeeper, for which two of the house’s servants—including the titular character Grace Marks—were convicted.

Widely considered Atwood’s most autobiographical work, this 1988 novel is another profound exploration of girlhood, female friendship, and the lifelong construction of one’s identity. In it, an artist looks back on her life, tracing how her sometimes-loving, sometimes-vicious, and always-intense interactions with three childhood friends still impact her adult life.

The first entry in the MaddAddam trilogy, Oryx and Crake introduces a post-apocalyptic world in which a main character known as Snowman lives among humanlike creatures called Crakers. Throughout a series of flashbacks, Snowman revisits his upbringing and early adulthood in a world of societal decay and the role he and a friend named Crake played in accelerating the decline.

Atwood earned her first Booker Prize, among several other prestigious awards, for this 2000 novel. It’s narrated by a woman named Iris as she looks back on her sister Laura's death and other major events of her life in the mid-20th century. Also a novel within a novel, Iris's story is interspersed with excerpts from a book attributed to Laura and telling the story of a scandalous affair—all of which culminate in a shocking final act.

It’ll likely come as no surprise that Atwood’s best-known book is also her best. The Handmaid’s Tale plunges readers into the insidious world of Gilead, a version of the U.S. that has been taken over by a theocracy run solely by men, with women largely banned from working outside the home, reading or writing, and having any agency whatsoever. It’s disturbing and horrific, but also a little too uncomfortably close to our real world—perhaps explaining why so many readers are still drawn to the expertly crafted novel more than 40 years after its release.