Grace Marks was convicted of murder during the mid-nineteenth century, and she spent most of her life in prison, though history is somewhat unclear about her guilt or innocence. In this novel, Margaret Atwood takes the known facts of the case and fills in the blanks with her imagination, yielding a plausible but dull story.

Most of the novel consists of the interactions between Grace and her confessor, a proto-psychologist named Dr. Simon Jordan. We hear Grace's own words as she tells her story to Dr. Jordan, but we're also privy to certain things happening around her of which she is not aware. Atwood's explanation of the murderous events is quite believable.

There are some interesting elements here, but Grace is a long-winded narrator. There are lots of details that create an intricate character portrait, but I frankly found them to be boring, and I struggled to finish the novel.