317 pages
English language
Published Nov. 30, 1979 by Simon & Schuster.
Imprisoned by walls of their own construction, here are three people, each in midlife, in midcrisis, forced to make choices--after the rules have changed. Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality, her suppressed rage, is married to the wrong man. She has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men. Hanging over them all is the ghost of Elizabeth's dead lover...and the dizzying threat of three lives careening inevitably toward the same climax.
Entirely unlike anything I'd normally read. But Margaret Atwood's unsettlingly realistic way of relating the stories of the characters' lives makes me want to phone them up after I put down the book and see how they're doing.
Well, if you told me you had a Margaret Atwood book about paleontologists falling in love, I would tell you you had my new favorite book. But apparently, it was not to be. The difference between this book and Atwood's later works is vast - this is redundant, with shallow characters and a flimsy plot. And the dinosaurs are shoehorned into a kind of annoying allegory
