Alias Grace

In 1843, Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery are murdered in Upper Canada. Grace Marks, a young Irish immigrant working as a servant in the house, is convicted of the crime along with the stableman James McDermott. The case draws on real events.

Sixteen years later Grace is held in Kingston Penitentiary. Simon Jordan, a young doctor, is brought in to interview her and decide whether she is guilty, insane or innocent. Grace says she remembers nothing of the day of the killings.

Grace narrates her own sections in the first person. Jordan's chapters are told in the third person and through his letters, and newspaper reports, poems and other documents are set among them. The book is divided into fifteen parts, each named for a quilt pattern.

The novel never settles what Grace did. Each conversation with Jordan gives him more of her story and no firmer ground to judge it. The reader is left weighing how far a narrator at the centre of a crime can be believed.

The Giller Prize went to the book in 1996, and it also made the Booker Prize shortlist.