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Margaret Atwood's 'glorious' short story collection goes to Chatto
Chatto & Windus has snapped up a "stunning" collection of short stories by twice Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood.
Deputy publishing director of the Vintage imprint Becky Hardie acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to the collection. It will publish on 7th March 2023.
Described as a highly personal book, Old Babes in the Wood features 15 stories exploring the "full warp and weft of experience".
Topics range from two best friends disagreeing about their shared past to the right way to stop someone from choking, from a daughter determining if her mother really is a witch to what to do with inherited relics such as Second World War parade swords.
"They feature cats, a confused snail, Martha Gellhorn, George Orwell, philosopher-astronomer-mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, a cabal of elderly female academics, and an alien tasked with retelling human fairy tales," the synopsis reads. "At the heart of the collection is a stunning sequence that follows a married couple as they travel the road together: the moments big and small that make up a long life of love and what comes after. The glorious range of Atwood’s creativity and humanity is on full beam in these tales, which by turn delight, illuminate and quietly devastate."
Atwood has written more than 50 books. According to Nielsen BooKScan in the UK, she has sold 3.69 million books for £30.1m since 1998, with the 1996 edition of The Handmaid’s Tale her bestseller on 736,603 copies sold. The Handmaid’s Tale was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, both of which were published by Vintage. The sequel was a global number one bestseller and saw Atwood share the Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo. In 2020 Vintage published Dearly, her first volume of poetry for a decade, and in 2022 Burning Questions, a collection of essays, was a Sunday Times bestseller.
"Old Babes in the Wood is a mixed bag, like life," she said. "It contains bad taste, also like life. Is a story about a woman who is a snail at heart really about being quite old? Maybe. Are dead beloveds actually dead in any real sense of the word? Maybe not. Are cats what they seem? Hardly ever."
