Lady Oracle is Margaret Atwood's third novel, a comic masterpiece in its parodies of literary forms and subversion of literary expectations.

Our heroine is Joan Foster, who has spent her life on the run, albeit quietly. Her adolescent obesity and the constant criticisms of her disapproving mother inspire her to flee to England. A continent away, Joan begins to find her own voice through her pseudonymous career as a romance novelist, an undertaking that she hides from Arthur, her manic-depressive, revolution-hungry husband. When Joan's writing finds its ultimate expression in a collection of feminist poetry that becomes the sleeper hit of the country, she is overwhelmed by the sudden rush of publicity and notoriety.

Unable to juggle her crumbling marriage, her madcap affair with an unpredictable performance artist, and her feud with an insidious celebrity blackmailer, Joan feigns her own death and flees to Italy, determined to start again incognito. But Joan, who has spent her whole life hiding, soon finds that the invisibility that once plagued her is now impossible to regain.