Moral Disorder - Rilegato

“Her stories are sophisticated, reticent, ornate, stark, supple, stiff, savage or forgiving; they are exactly what she wants them to be. They are stories from the prime of life.”
— Times Literary Supplement

"In this superb new collection of short stories, Atwood displays the same intellectual fearlessness and wit of her other books, but this time tempered with a compassion and richness of portraiture that will surprise even her most avid fans....Following the protagonist Nell through her adolescence and adulthood in these stories is like staying up all night every decade or so with an old friend. Each intense encounter builds on a shared and cumulative history between character and reader, and Atwood's magic is such that we not only sense Nell's psychological development over the course of these stories, but we mature ourselves as a consequence of reading them."
-- The Boston Globe

"Atwood's meticulous stories exert a powerful centrifugal force, pulling the reader into a whirl of droll cultural analysis and provocative emotional truths. Gimlet-eyed, gingery, and impishly funny, Atwood dissects the inexorable demands of family, the persistence of sexism, the siege of old age, and the complex temperaments of other species (the story about the gift horse is to die for). Shaped by Darwinian perspective, political astuteness, autobiographical elements, and a profound trust in literature, Atwood's stories evoke humankind's disasterous hubris and phenomenal spirit with empathy and bemusement."
-- Booklist (starred review)

"Atwood mingles omniscient with first-person narrative, moving backward and forward in time through nearly seven decades, to portray her sentient protagonist Nell, a freelance journalist and sometime teacher whose eventual commitment to writing seems born of the secrets and evasions into which a lifetime of relationships and responsibilities propels her....Crisp, vivid detail and imagery and a rich awareness of the unity of human generations, people and animals, and Nell's own exterior and inmost selves, make Moral Disorder one of Atwood's most accessible and engaging works yet."
-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)