totalitarian society. In CAT'S EYE, Atwood moves away from this overtly political territory to a lanscape which is more personal but no less disturbing. Painter Elaine Risley, pushing fifty, returns from Vancouver to Toronto for a retrospective of her work, which has been much celebrated by the women's movement and much attacked from other quarters. Toronto is the city she fled many years earlier, hoping to leave behind the tyrannical and obsessive memories of her early life there--from her post-World War II school days and fifties adolescence, through the avant-garde art scene of the sixties, to the advent of feminism in the early seventies. Now, as she wanders the streets of the city, which are no longer puritancial and dowdy but resplendent with eighties glitz, Elaine confronts the submerged layers of her past--her unconventional family, her eccentric and brilliant brother, the self righteous and dangerous Mrs. Smeath, and the two men Elaine later came to love in diverse and sometimes disastrous ways. But it is the enigmatic Cordelia, once her tormentor, then her best friend, whose elusive yet powerful presence in her life Elaine finally comes to understand. The realm of childhood and growing up, with its secrecies, cruelities, betrayals, and terrors, has never been so luminously evoked. Throught the quirky, idiosyncratic voice of Elaine Risley, Atwood has given fascinating dimensions to the ambiguous roots of women's relationships, both with one another and with the world. By turns diquietly, hilarious, compassionate, haunting, andmordant, CAT'S EYE is vintage Atwood, and her most deeply felt work of fiction to date.

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