Excerpt from Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

While the wars were going on, the British had wanted to stuff as many Protestants as possible into Nova Scotia. One of these French Protestants joined our ancestral line. So did some Scots from the Highland Clearances in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period during which many small tenant farmers got turfed out of their age-old communities by their own clan chiefs. This was not only fallout from the defeat of the Scots in the 1746 Jacobite rising but was also a result of the spread of profitable sheep farming. I used to joke that I was descended from a long line of folks—going back to the Puritans, but not limited to them—who'd been kicked out of other countries for being contentious, or heretical, or indigent, or otherwise disagreeable.

Here are some of the names from the family shrubbery: Atwoods, Killams, Websters, McGowans, Lewises (from Wales), Nickersons, Moreaus, Robinsons, Chases. Those are just a few of the branches. If you go into the shrubbery, don't get lost. It's tangled.

The first of my father's family to reach Nova Scotia's South Shore came from Cape Cod. Cape Cod is still crawling with Atwoods, descended from those who arrived in the early seventeenth century, either on the Mayflower or shortly after it. They clustered around Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and then Chatham. Several museums, including the Atwood Museum in Chatham, are well worth a visit—don't miss the cat door under the stairs through which a cat was stuffed every night to catch mice under the floor. (What did the house smell like? I wonder.) There's also a portrait of a later dentist Atwood, who got himself painted in formal dress with three sets of dentures set out in front of him of which he was evidently proud.

It was the younger brother of the museum's original Atwood owner who went to Nova Scotia in 1758, landing in Shelburne, a small port on the south coast. From Shelburne, the Atwoods spread out, giving rise to several privateers operating out of Liverpool, to a number of sailors, and to some loggers and farmers.

By the time my father was born, his family was living at Upper Clyde, quite a distance from the coast up the Clyde River. My grandfather ran a little sawmill that made white pine shingles, cedar being almost non-existent in Nova Scotia. Stacking these shingles at age six was the first of many jobs my father would hold. He enjoyed this immensely, according to him—children then being expected to contribute to the collective family economy as soon as they could.

The family would not have described itself as poor—they had a house, they had a cow, they had a parlour organ. My grandfather belonged to the Masons, which meant he must have been at least marginally respectable. But the family didn't use money for as many things as people use it for today. If what was needed was something you could make—from wood, such as tables and chairs, or cloth or yarn, such as dresses, quilts, or mittens—you made it yourself. People got married, almost without exception. There weren't many jobs for spinsters, and everyone knew that a man would have a very hard time running a small farm single-handed: a wife was necessary.

My grandmother, who was my grandfather's second wife, kept chickens and ran a vegetable garden. She had the Rolls-Royce of wood-burning kitchen ranges, with an oven, a warming oven, a hot-water heater, and chrome trim. She smoked her own fish, and made butter in a churn; as a child I helped her make some.

Seeing this way of life, unchanged since the nineteenth century, was very helpful to me when I was writing Alias Grace. My grandmother's stove was much fancier than anything available to Grace Marks, but the rhythm of the work and the shape of the days was much the same. My father, Carl, was the eldest of five, unless you count Uncle Freddy, son of the first wife. He was already grown up—a mysterious figure, lurking around the barn not saying much, and said to be not quite right in the head. The story we were told was that he'd been gassed in the First World War, but another informant said he'd already been like that. As with so many family stories, you don't think to investigate them until there's nobody left to ask.

Excerpted from Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 2025 by Margaret Atwood. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.