I picked up this good-condition hardcover from Better World Books - having apparently forgotten that I bought a softcover a couple of weeks ago {wry grin}. It's a collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood.

The stories touch on sexual awakenings, emotional ups and downs, coming of age, and more... unusual subjects; one story features a woman who has surgery to remove a cyst, only to find that, while benign, it was a teratoma - an unnerving mass of hair, teeth, and bone fragments - which she decides to keep in a bottle (!). Another woman, having accompanied her husband on a dig at the site where a bog body has been found, copes with the disintegration of their marriage with an unsettling amount of bog-corpse imagery wound in.

I can't say that many of these characters are likeable, though quite a few are sympathetic. Atwood excels at putting us in their heads, and that's not always a comfortable place to be, especially with characters who crave attention that they cannot get, or who have lost loved ones and can't come to terms with it.

A story that made me want this collection in the first place: "The Age of Lead," which was inspired by the exhumation of John Torrington, a young stoker who was among the first to die on the lost Franklin Expedition (see Frozen in Time for more on the research into the bodies). The story is told from the viewpoint of a woman who's watching the research expedition on television, and who muses over the young man's life and death as compared with her own life.

I left this book in the Little Free Library at around 1:30; hope the finder enjoys it!

*** Released for the 2015 Canada Days release challenge. ***

*** Released for the 2015 Allergic to A challenge. ***