This book began by affirming Margaret Atwood's international reputation as one of the most powerful and innovative authors in the world today. Subsequent chapters traced Atwood's development from the publication of The Circle Game in 1966 to her most recent work The Door (2007), noting that each phase of writing demonstrated both a commitment to, and interrogation of, specific themes. These textual focus points were, however, shown to defy neat classifications in terms of chronology and genre, since Atwood returns to, intertwines and alters perceptions of issues such as, nation, gender, politics, myth, chronology, geographical space, ecological ethics and authorial identity. By tracing a single strand – for example, national identity – it becomes possible to excavate how a focus on Canada (Surfacing), developed into an investment in global concerns (Bodily Harm) and an awareness of threats to future world stability (The Handmaid's Tale), then was turned back into a sharp investigation of the recent history of Canadian identity and current multiculturalism (Cat's Eye and The Robber Bride), but at the same time noted that national history must be personalized, individuated and fragmented (Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin), before finally returning to a future dystopic world and vistas of extinction (Oryx and Crake and The Door). Although, of course, extinction is as relevant to the 1979 novel Life Before Man with its evocation of prehistory as it is to the 2003 novel Oryx and Crake with its positing of future self-annihilation. Equally, while it might be critically neat to identify Surfacing and Cat's Eye as primarily ‘Canadian’ novels, they are also concerned with gendered identity, the role of history and myth, relationships between parents and children, and the unreliability of the authorial/narrator's voice. When reading and analysing Margaret Atwood's writing, therefore, it is essential to remember that while these works were published chronologically from 1966 to today, ideas, characters, narratives and language are intricately interwoven.

Indeed, Atwood's own use of a sewing metaphor provides the best way of approaching her corpus as a whole. At the end of Alias Grace, Grace Marks finishes a quilt that follows the Tree of Paradise design, the pattern of which is formal and linear with ‘a border of snakes entwined’ and ‘one large tree’ with purple leaves and red fruits, placed on a white background (AG 534).