This chapter, paired with Chapter 2, suggests a close connection between politics at all levels in Atwood’s thinking, contrasting Somacarrera’s discussion of personal power politics with Rao’s analysis of power politics at the national level. It traces the development of themes of home and exile across selected texts: Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. The argument focuses on concepts of home and estrangement, showing how discourses of home are an extension of discourses of nation and national belonging, and how across Atwood’s later novels discourses of home have shifted into discourses of insecurity and alienation. Here storytelling is of paramount importance, providing patterns of meaning and a form of therapy as it becomes a poetics of survival in a postapocalyptic world where any idea of habitation is fragile and home is no longer a place of safety.

This chapter explores the variety of genres within which Atwood has chosen to write about history, interweaving historical fact with imaginative rewriting and reinventing, with reference to her poems in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, her nonfiction essay “In Search of Alias Grace,” and her novels. The focus is on Atwood’s narrative art, with detailed analyses of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin. These novels with their splicing together of different genres (historical documentary, fictive autobiography, crime fiction, dystopias, Gothic) illustrate the multiple scripts and alternative perspectives through which history may be told, in Atwood’s reappraisal of Canada’s national history and heritage myths, as she reinterprets Canadian themes through her contemporary social, ethical, and global concerns.