There are few reading pleasures more delightful than the feeling of instant rapport a narrative voice can conjure, an intimacy that quickly becomes immersive as you are drawn into a confidence both close and resonant. In Cat’s Eye, the voice belongs to Elaine Risley, a painter who has come back to her native Toronto for a retrospective exhibition of her art. On that return from a self-imposed and apparently necessary exile, she is tempted—with the inevitability that makes all real temptation worthy of the name—to unlayer her past: lost time, lost friends, lost luck, lost meaning. Elaine’s recollections of her teenaged friendship with Cordelia are imbued with longing and an ominous undertone of elegy, for it is their relationship that introduces Elaine to the confusions of loyalty and love, the effects of cruelty and betrayal, and the contradictory repercussions of liberty. Atwood is just as sensitive insinuating all the aches of adulthood and the pains of love, the fleeting truths of creativity and the hard consequences of big ambitions not quite big enough.