A supreme observer of relations between women and men, Margaret Atwood explores some less than conventional bonds in this marvellous collection: that between a political activist and his cat, a woman and her dead psychiatrist, an artist and the men she stalks to use as naked models, a potter and the adoring poets who so smother and mythologise her that she is driven into the arms of her accountant. A man finds himself surrounded by women who are becoming paler, more silent and literally smaller. A melancholy teenage love is swept away by a Canadian hurricane, while a tired, middle-aged affection is rekindled by a spectacle of rare Jamaican birds. And in the title story, the Bluebeard legend is updated as an ironic study of marital deception and self-deception. Margaret Atwood's brilliant collection displays the dramatic range of her art.