The Year of the Flood

by Margaret Atwood

Book Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments--the second book of the internationally celebrated MaddAddam trilogy, set in the visionary world of Oryx and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0771008449
• ISBN13: 9780771008443
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Length: 434 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 24.2" x 16.8" x 16.8"

Customer Reviews

Confrontational holotype to speculative fiction

Atwood takes current trends and projects them into the future. I would say extrapolates but with the past two years I find it hard to say she was wrong. This is an important wake-up call. I find her style at times to be garish and try-hard, but with the context of this book it really works well. This is the pandemic book you've been looking for.

Missing 20 pages at end of the book due to a misprint.

Missing a lot of pages at the end and now I'm trying to find another copy just to finish the book! I love Margaret Atwood writing... Really hate that I'm missing the ending! Book ends at page 300 and starts again with the begining pages/chapters of the book. Very dissappointing!

Fantastic Speculative Fiction

Atwood has stated before that she writes "speculative fiction" not science fiction. This is a very apt description for her near-future dystopian novels. With this book, she proves she is a master of her self-described genre. This book is a companion book to Oryx and Crake which Atwood previously published. The story takes place in a near-future North America sharply divided along class lines where people live in heavily secured corporate compounds or what used to be cities, now derisively dubbed "pleeblands". The only semblance of government remaining is headed up by big brother type corporations and and "law" is enforced by a paramilitary organization called the "CorpSeCorps". I chose to forgive the weak pun because the rest of the novel is so good. Civilian possession of firearms has been outlawed and one can bet that if he/she makes any noise, the corpsmen are going to come looking. The protagonists here are women (traditional Atwood) living mostly in the pleeblands who belong to a separatist cult called God's Gardeners. Their leader is the charismatic Adam One. The group is a self-reliant, vegan commune that has established itself among abandoned city buildings and rooftop gardens. Their religious code is based in a blend of science and several major faiths with some made-up stuff thrown in for good measure. It portends the coming, apocalyptic "waterless flood". Each chapter opens with a spiritual lesson from Adam One and is followed by one of the cult's poetic hymns. Many of Adam One's lessons are downright hilarious. One of Atwood's greatest talents is weaving humor into her disturbing narratives. The "saints" of this cult are canonized preservationists and activists (Dian Fossey and others). The residents of this future world must deal with all sorts of man-made horrors. Animal protein is scarce as traditional food sources have been exhausted by over-population, climate change and disease. A huge number of animal species have become extinct. Genetically engineered creatures have escaped into the wild. Global warming has made a desert of the American mid-west and melted the polar ice caps, flooding North American coastal cities. Disease is rampant. Frightening new gene-spliced microbes crop up regularly. Atwood's characters are deeply textured and fully realized. The author dexterously examines the relationships among women and between men and women as she has done in previous works. The plot is multi-layered, playing out in the characters' memories (another talent of Atwood's) and in real time. The dystopian themes are fully explored and vividly imagined. Atwood has a singular and fantastic talent for taking contemporary trends and amplifying them (not necessarily exaggerating them) to create horrifying futures. In the end the "flood" does come and most of humanity is wiped out. We discover that a new race of strange, disease-resistant, genetically engineered humans has been created. Will this new race become the dominant species in

Recommend the audio version

I was transported by "The Year of the Flood". Surely this book, along with "Oryx and Crake" and the much hoped-for third volume in a possible trilogy, is destined to be a classic. Unlike most reviewers, I listened to the audio versions rather than read them. I finished "Oryx" and began "Flood" immediately so I lived in Atwood's near future for many suspended hours. I came away wanting to plant my own vegetable garden, start a hive and donate to the World Wildlife Fund. Her vision is of a future that is the inevitable outcome of how we live today... terrible, savage and unsure. But "The Year of the Flood" is also a time of cleansing, and beginning again. Paradise lost or regained? Dystopian or utopian? I can't decide. I am left full of questions, unbalanced by the complexity of it all and awed by her refusal to shy away from ambiguity. One note on the audio version. The reading is excellent. But beyond that, the hymns are sung and enrich the text. I'm not sure Adam One would have been as appealing to me had I read his sermons and hymns rather than listened to them. Someone, Ms. Atwood perhaps, put a lot of thought into creating a living religion based on compassion and commonsense. I can't wait for Volume Three, but then I must. Thank you, Ms. Atwood, for your wonderful and unique work. I hope it has the effect of raising awareness of the fragility of our earth.

Waiting for Pandemic

In Margaret Atwood's three compelling and quite different visions of an apocalyptic future, some things never change. There are always the powerful corporations intent on obtaining profit from every human desire: the Soul Scrolls of "The Handmaid's Tale," which turn prayer into a commodity; the Secretburger franchises of "The Year of the Flood," which dispense cheap burgers of dubious provenance. The environment is always degraded, resulting in a precipitous drop in the birth rate ("The Handmaid's Tale") and the terrifying daily thunderstorms of "The Year of the Flood." In all three stories, there is an Orwellian social structure: a tiny elite intent both on holding power at all costs and on a comfortable, even luxurious, life style; a larger group of terrified, obedient mid-level party/corporate functionaries; and a vast underclass that lives in squalor and in violence---the "pleeblands" of her newest novel. And, most important to all three dystopias, there are cold, brutal men with the most up to date weapons "who make sure--successfully, until the global pandemics in both "Oryx and Crake" and "The Year of the Flood" nearly destroy the human race-- that everyone is terrorized and that power remains with the corporate elites. Thus, it's quite amazing that her newest dystopia is so different, so inventive, and so convincing, even though elements of "The Year of the Flood" overlap with those in "Oryx and Crake" and the novels are set in parallel, time-wise, with a male protagonist in "Oryx" and two female protagonists, Toby and Ren, in "Flood." Completely original and central to "Flood" is the made-up religion (complete with made-up hymns) of Gods Gardeners, led by its fatherly chief composter, sermonizer, and philosopher, Adam One. He's a wonderful pastiche, equally earnest and ridiculous--straight out of the pages of "Mother Earth News." The characterizations of the rest of the Gardeners, the numbered Adams and Eves, are equally tender, as they tend their bees and mushrooms and the rooftop garden and patiently store away supplies in hidden "Ararats" for the calamity they know is coming. Unlike Orwell's degraded masses, these proles are full of hope. Don't miss this newest Atwood. She can put a plot together better than just about anyone, and the coalescing threads of this one kept me reading until midnight as the world came to an------well, not exactly, and not in the way you might think. Apocalypse, as constructed by Atwood, is never predictable, always astonishing, and certainly not impossible.

A fantastic companion to Oryk & Crake

I devoured this book. Admittedly, I'm a fan of Margaret Atwood, dystopian near futures, and loved Oryx & Crake--I got this novel the first minute it was available. But there was a lot of opportunity to be disappointed, and fortunately, none of that occurred. Others have summarized the plot, and I won't do that here. If you've read Oryx & Crake, you'll understand the world of The Year of the Flood. If you haven't, it's possible to read this book first and catch on, as the story is told largely through flashbacks. The thing that I find that deepens the reality and richness of this novel is Atwood's ability to imagine current trends and then extrapolate them out to their most absurd manifestation. In this novel, she tackles simultaneously: genetic engineering, women's rights, urban gardening and local food, religious splinter groups, the gap between rich and poor, the power of corporations, the privatizing of government, ridiculous branding in marketing....and more. You can imagine how each of these trends can be taken to its extreme, and in The Year of the Flood, Atwood paints a world that is crazy, out of balance, terrifying, and yet immediately recognizable and somehow familiar. Wonderfully, the end of this book seems (to me) to leave it clear that there is a third (rumoured) novel on its way in this grim, amazing, somehow hopeful future world of Atwood's creation.

Margaret Atwood makes me want to stick my head in the sand...

I know that sounds bad, but her dystopian visions are so profoundly disturbing, I find they influence my thinking forever after. Say what you will--her nightmares are not easy to dismiss! Readers of 2003's Oryx and Crake will recognize the world of The Year of the Flood. Neither a prequel nor a sequel, the latter is more of a companion novel. It's set in the same world, covering roughly the same time span. Whereas Oryx and Crake was a post-apocalyptic narrative told from Jimmy's point of view, here the narrators are Toby and Ren. Jimmy, Oryx, and Crake make appearances in this novel, and readers of both books will discovered minor characters from the former novel are major characters in the latter. In short, the two are intertwined, but may be read in any order. It is not necessary to have read Oryx and Crake first, though ultimately reading them both is an immensely satisfying experience, shedding light on many aspects of the story being told. Now to the story...Toby and Ren have both spent significant portions of their lives involved with a fringe religious group called God's Gardeners. Ren was brought to the ascetic group as a child by her mother. Toby found her way there out of desperation in adulthood. Each has professed disbelief in the tenets of the religion, but the pacifistic and environmental teachings have become deeply ingrained in both. At the opening of the novel, it is Year Twenty-Five in the God's Gardeners' calendar; the Year of the Waterless Flood. From the beginning, the group's prophet-like leader had preached that a "waterless flood" was coming to wipe out humanity. In addition to their dogmatic environmentalism, the group believed in preparing for this flood with survival skills and food caches called "Ararats." The predicted day has come in the form of a global pandemic. Society has broken down completely. From their respective places of isolation, each woman wonders if she may be the last human left and struggles to survive in this altered world. As everyone knows, there's nothing like apocalypse to make a person introspective. As each woman reflects upon the ups and downs of her life with the Gardeners and beyond, the reader gradually gleans a fuller picture of the world these women lived in, their individual and joint histories, what led to cataclysm, and what has ultimately happened to the world. As one might expect from Atwood, The Year of the Flood is a beautiful telling of an ugly story. And what a story it is! In addition to being very much a novel of ideas, it is an utterly un-put-downable page-turner! It's a quick read, with short chapters and lots of white space on the pages. The novel flies by. The ending is satisfying and unsatisfying at once. It sheds some light on Oryx and Crake's enigmatic conclusion and completes this arc of the story, but leaves this reader very much hoping for a final volume of this rumored trilogy.