This is essentially a follow up to Oryx and Crake tells the story of that world created there from a totally different prospective. It may help in some ways to have read the previous novel but it does read as a stand alone and is a fantastic and imaginative read from one of the best writers around.

Synopsis

The sun brightens in the east, reddening the blue-grey haze that marks the distant ocean. The vultures roosting on the hydro poles fan out their wings to dry them. the air smells faintly of burning. The waterless flood ? a manmade plague ? has ended the world. But two young women have survived: Ren, a young dancer trapped where she worked, in an upmarket sex club (the cleanest dirty girls in town); and Toby, who watches and waits from her rooftop garden. Is anyone else out there?

Reviews

** 'A tour de force ... as pacy as a thriller ... laced with Atwood's dry wit, and her savage, credible invention
Erica Wagner, The Times

** 'Atwood knows how to show us ourselves, but the mirror she holds up to life does more than reflect ... The Year of the Flood isn't prophecy, but it is eerily possible
Jeanette Winterson

** 'Margaret Atwood has outdone - and outsung - herself this time. The Year of the Flood is at once a solemn praise song to human hope and a dead-serious poke at our capacity for self-destruction ... Shows Atwood at the pinnacle of her prodigious creative powers
Elle

** 'A sharp observer of the female psyche ... Atwood's richly fertile imagination plays to exuberant and often comic effect
Caroline Moore, Daily Telegraph

** 'A gripping and visceral book that showcases her pure storytelling talents with energy, inventiveness and narrative panache
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

About the Author

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.   She is the author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman, The Handmaid's Tale, The Robber Bride and Alias Grace. Her novel, The Blind Assassin,  won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000.   Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.   Author photo © George Whiteside More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation