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The Year of the Flood

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The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury Publishing)
When I ripped the paper off this book under the Christmas tree, I sighed with contentment, but was not fooled – I knew Andreas had bought it as much for himself as for me. We are, as many others of our age, committed Atwood folk.

The Year of the Flood continues in much the same vein as Oryx and Crake (the narratives interlink, but you can read the former without having to read the latter first)... the long predicted disaster has now happened, and Atwood is concerned with what remains when a bio-engineered dystopia is wracked by plague.

It’s unusual for Atwood to return to an earlier book and pick up the threads, but as she tells us herself, “the core subject matter continued to preoccupy me... [and] the perceived gap between that supposedly unreal future and the harsh one we may very well live through was narrowing fast.”

Not only does Atwood explore religion through God's Gardeners, a group of activists devoted to the melding of science and religion, who have long been predicting such a disaster, but chooses two central female characters, Ren – a worker in a high-end sex club – and Toby, an accomplished herbalist and bee-keeper who finds herself waiting out the disaster in a luxury spa, to explore a more female reality than presented in Oryx and Crake.

Ever-practical Atwood explains:  "I thought [these] would in fact be quite good locations in which to wait out a pandemic plague: at least you'd have bar snacks and a lot of clean towels."

Read this book. It’s frightening, tender, dark and thoughtful. And you get to meet ‘liobams’, lion and lamb gene-spliced life forms. Nifty.

Click here to get your copy now.

Have you read The Year of the Flood? Tell us what you thought of it in the comment box below.



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