Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon) is in prison for the double murder of her employer, the wealthy Ontario-based Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper and lover, Nancy Montgomery. But is she truly guilty – or is it a case of wrong place, wrong time?

You’ll keep on guessing throughout the series because Marks - the drama’s protagonist - has the storytelling skills of a gifted writer.

But it’s the true backstory to Netflix’s new drama that’s most compelling. Inspired by real-life events that took place in Canada in the 1843, Margaret Atwood (of The Handmaid’s Tale) created her own version in her novel Alias Grace, published in 1996.

Writing in the afterword, Atwood recounted just how much attention the case drew at the time:

“The details were sensational: Grace Marks was uncommonly pretty and also extremely young; Kinnear’s housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, had previously given birth to an illegitimate child and was Thomas Kinnear’s mistress; at her autopsy she was found to be pregnant. Grace and her fellow servant James McDermott had run away to the United States together and were assumed by the press to be lovers. The combination of sex, violence, and the deplorable insubordination of the lower classes was most attractive to the journalists of the day.”

The terrifyingly true story that inspired Netflix’s Alias Grace