The Robber Bride.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

No review of recent Canadian literature would be complete without a commentary on Margaret Atwood, who has thrilled international audiences with such best-selling novels as The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye. In The Robber Bride, a brilliantly conceived, exquisitely crafted spoof on the obsessions of the last three decades, Atwood reaffirms her position as Canada's premier English-language storyteller.

Tony, Charis, and Roz are three very different women with one thing in common: Zenia. Beautiful, smart, manipulative, and completely immoral, Zenia worms her way into their lives by playing on their vanity, using them, making off with their men, then disappearing. Word reaches the three friends that Zenia has been killed somewhere in the Middle East; they attend her funeral, quite happy that she is dead. But one afternoon when they meet for lunch, they are startled to spot, of all people, Zenia!

Tony, Charis, and Roz met in the sixties, when all three were students at the university. Tony, a bright but socially insecure girl with an unusual passion for military history, won distinction for her stunning academic achievements and also her ability to talk backwards. Her husband's name is West; originally it was Stew, but she turned it around and switched two letters to make it pronounceable. At school the girls would beg her to sing "My Darling Clementine," and Tony would sometimes oblige: Gnilrad ym ho, Gnilrad ym ho, Gnilrad ym ho, Enitn(e)melc . . . (Sometimes she had to fudge a little.) Tony attended the university on an inheritance that came to her when her father blew his brains out after her mother had run off with another man. Now she is a professor of military history. In her spare time she reenacts famous battles on a miniature field on which she places objects such as cloves and grains of rice to represent soldiers.

Tony met West when they were students and he was living with Zenia. Puny and drab, Tony was flattered when the gorgeous and exotic Zenia started showing an interest in her. Zenia played on Tony's intellectual pretensions by engaging her in late-night conversations, then bilked her out of a large sum of money and took off, abandoning West. Eventually Tony and West married, but then Zenia reappeared to seduce him once again. When at last she dumped him a second time, West returned to Tony a broken man.

Charis, a hippie type during her school years, continues living in the Age of Aquarius, collecting crystals, burning incense...