Margaret Atwood is best known for her novels, especially those that like The Blind Assassin (2002) and Oryx and Crake (2003), have been awarded and nominated respectively for major international prizes, such as the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. However, she has also written works for children and this chapter begins by tracing the changes in these books as a means of illuminating the developments that have occurred in her adult literature produced since 2000. In Anna's Pet (1980) Anna is taught by her grandparents how to treat animals with kindness, a message that is repeated more vehemently in For the Birds (1990). In this second work, Samantha throws a stone at a bird and, as a consequence, is transformed into a bird herself by the witch/wise woman next door, so that she may learn at first hand the plight of living creatures and the destructive violence of humans. These are morally didactic texts in which the children are made to pay for their mistakes. By the mid-1990s Atwood's maxims had become more palatable, as the selfish Prunella, rude Ramsay, together with the timid and sad Bob and doleful Dorinda, learn to be kind through comic and forgiving narratives; for example, Prunella has a purple peanut stuck to and then removed from the end of her nose (Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995), Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003), and Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)). In each work the moral message is clear, but in the later works reprimand is replaced with forgiveness. And this is precisely what happens in Atwood's works for adult readers, although the moral message is never quite as clear, nor the redemption proffered as simple.

The shift towards forgiveness was evident in Alias Grace in which the instability of meaning – history and narrative – was supplanted by the close association between the act of telling and the process of salvation, and in which the Tree of Paradise quilt made by Grace served as a metaphor for the redemptive power of art. Atwood's latest writing develops these two strands – taletelling and redemption – while at the same time returning to and engaging with the dominant concerns of her earlier works: gender, Canadian/international politics, and history.