Four books that changed Meg Keneally

Meg Keneally started her working life as a junior public affairs officer at the Australian Consulate-General in New York, before moving to Dublin to work as a sub-editor and freelance features writer. On returning to Australia, she joined the Daily Telegraph as a general news reporter, founded a public relations company, and has worked in corporate affairs. With her father Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s List) she is the author of the novels The Soldier's Curse and The Unmourned.

One of four books that changed Keneally the younger, as shared at the Sydney Morning Herald:

THE HANDMAID'S TALE
Margaret Atwood

When I read The Handmaid's Tale, I had just done Nineteen Eighty-Four for the HSC. While I'd loved it and was in a dystopian frame of mind, Atwood hit closer to home. I'd had a reasonably sheltered childhood so the concept of women's bodies being used in this way, and their individuality being discarded, was seismic. Atwood wrote with such authority that the book had all the immediacy of a news report.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Handmaid's Tale made A.J. Hartley's list of five favorite books about the making of a dystopia, Lidia Yuknavitch's 6 favorite books list, Elisa Albert's list of nine revelatory books about motherhood, Michael W. Clune's top five list of books about imaginary religions, Jeff Somers's top six list of often misunderstood SF/F novels, Jason Sizemore's top five list of books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, S.J. Watson's list of four books that changed him, Shaun Byron Fitzpatrick's list of eight of the most badass ladies in all of banned literature, Guy Lodge's list of ten of the best dystopias in fiction, art, film, and television, Bethan Roberts's top ten list of novels about childbirth, Rachel Cantor's list of the ten worst jobs in books, Charlie Jane Anders and Kelly Faircloth's list of the best and worst childbirth scenes in science fiction and fantasy, Lisa Tuttle's critic's chart of the top Arthur C. Clarke Award winners, and PopCrunch's list of the sixteen best dystopian books of all time.

--Marshal Zeringue