Win A Signed Copy of Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's short story collection Stone Mattress was released in paperback last week. To celebrate, I've teamed up with her publisher Virago Books to give Workshy Fop readers the opportunity to win a signed copy of the book, along with a themed prize relating to the title story, Stone Mattress. In the story, a character revenges a crime using a stromatolite fossil - therefore, the winner will receive a set of fossil bookends! Just leave a comment below this blog to enter. The closing date will be 4pm on Tuesday October . The winner will be randomly selected and notified by email (UK only).

To give you a taste of what's in store in Stone Mattress, here are the opening paragraphs...

 At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.

    Among the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. She’s had enough of men for a while. She’s made an inner memo to renounce flirtations and any consequences that might result from them. She doesn’t need the cash, not any more. She’s not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. Surely she has at last achieved this modest goal.