The Man Booker Prize (nominee)Orange Prize for Fiction (nominee)In 1843, a 16-year-old Canadian housemaid named Grace Marks was triedfor the murder of her employer and his mistress. The sensationalistictrial made headlines throughout the world, and the jury delivered aguilty verdict. Yet opinion remained fiercely divided about Marks--wasshe a spurned woman who had taken out her rage on two innocent victims,or was she an unwilling victim herself, caught up in a crime she was tooyoung to understand? Such doubts persuaded the judges to commute hersentence to life imprisonment, and Marks spent the next 30 years in anassortment of jails and asylums, where she was often exhibited as a starattraction. InAlias Grace, Margaret Atwood reconstructsMarks's story in fictional form. Her portraits of 19th-century prisonand asylum life are chilling in their detail. The author alsointroduces Dr. Simon Jordan, who listens to the prisoner's tale with amixture of sympathy and disbelief. In his effort to uncover the truth,Jordan uses the tools of the then rudimentary science of psychology.But the last word belongs to the book's narrator--Grace herself.