The Handmaid's Tale

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In what used to be the United States of America rises a totalitarian state named Gilead, where women garbed in red known as Handmaids are assigned in rotation as birth vessels to men of power known as Commanders. Their role is simple: to serve the biological purpose of reproduction, after an unmentioned phenomenon leaves much of the country with fatal levels of infertility. One such Handmaid only referred to as Offred, based on a genitive naming system after the names of their Commanders who serve as their owners, tells the story of her everyday life and routine, how she discovers an underground resistance group known as Mayday, and how both her Commander and his Wife make her complicit in their various secret schemes that neither must be aware of. In a new world order where the only purpose of a fertile woman is to give birth, Offred tries to reconcile her current situation with fleeting memories of the past, her partner and daughter, and hopes that she might be reunited with them again one day.

The Blind Assassin

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The posthumous publication of a scathing novel entitled The Blind Assassin shakes up the reputation of several residents of Fort Ticonderoga, the country hometown of author Laura Chase who drives a car off a bridge to her death. Even years later, the controversial content of her book still haunts the real-life figures it allegedly alludes to. One of them is her sister Iris Chase Griffen, wife of nouveau riche Richard E. Griffen, particularly concerned considering his political ambitions. Decades later as she nears her death, Iris begins to write her very own autobiography hoping that it would clarify things and reach her estranged granddaughter Sabrina, who has been used as a pawn together with her deceased daughter Aimee by her sister-in-law Winifred Griffen Prior, who blames her for the death of her brother and his political aspirations. As the old woman awaits her life’s end on her deathbed, she reveals some long-concealed family secrets.

Life of Pi

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Named after a Parisian swimming pool, Piscine Molitor Patel, known to his family and friends by the nickname “Pi”, has had a colorful childhood in Pondicherry, spending much of his time tending to the animals of his father’s zoo as well as flirting with three different religions at the same time as some sort of spiritual experimentation. His metaphysical issues are immediately replaced with existential ones as the family decides to sell the zoo and the animals so they can all start anew as immigrants in Canada. As the day comes, he, his parents, and his older brother Ravi all board the Japanese ship Tsimtsum along with some animals that are going to various zoos in North America with them. The ship sinks amidst a freak storm somewhere in the Pacific, leaving Pi on a lifeboat alone with a wounded zebra, a hungry hyena, a dazed orangutan, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.