| View Larger Image | The Year of the Flood: A Novel | Hardcoverby Margaret Atwood (Author)
| List Price: | $26.95 | | Price: | $15.75 | | You Save: | $11.20 (42%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Nan A. Talese | | Edition: | First Printingth Edition | | Page Count: | 448 Pages | | Publication Date: | September 22, 2009 | | Sales Rank: | 261st |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780385528771
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- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power. The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners—a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life—has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers . . .Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away . . .By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive. |
Amazon.com Review
Book Description The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power. The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners--a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life--has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers... Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away... By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive. Margaret Atwood on The Year of the Flood I’ve never before gone back to a novel and written another novel related to it. Why this time? Partly because so many people asked me what happened right after the end of the 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake. I didn’t actually know, but the questions made me think about it. That was one reason. Another was that the core subject matter has continued to preoccupy me. When Oryx and Crake came out, it seemed to many like science fiction--way out there, too weird to be possible--but in the three years that passed before I began writing The Year of the Flood, the perceived gap between that supposedly unreal future and the harsh one we might very well live through was narrowing fast. What is happening to our world? What can we do to reverse the damage? How long have we got? And, most importantly--what kind of "we"? In other words, what kind of people might undertake the challenge? Dedicated ones--they’d have to be. And unless you believe our planet is worth saving, why bother? So the question of inspirational belief entered the picture, and once you have a set of beliefs--as distinct from a body of measurable knowledge--you have a religion. The God’s Gardeners appear briefly in Oryx and Crake, but in The Year of the Flood, they’re central. Like all religions, the Gardeners have their own leader, Adam One. They also have their own honoured saints and martyrs, their special days, their theology. They may look strange and obsessive and even foolish to non-members, but they’re serious about what they profess; as are their predecessors, who are with us today. I’ve found out a great deal about rooftop gardens and urban beekeeping while writing this book! Another question frequently asked about Oryx and Crake concerned gender. Why was the story told by a man? How would it have been different if the narrator had been a woman? Such questions led me to Ren and Toby, and then to their respective lives, and also to their places of refuge. A high-end sex club and a luxury spa 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. In his book, The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton proposes that our interest in narrative is built in--selected during the very long period the human race spent in the Pleistocene--because any species with the ability to tell stories about both past and future would have an evolutionary edge. Will there be a crocodile in the river tomorrow, as there was last year? If so, better not go there. Speculative fictions about the future, like The Year of the Flood, are narratives of that kind. Where will the crocodiles be? How will we avoid them? What are our chances? --Margaret Atwood (Photo © George Whiteside) |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 65 reviews)
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The Year of the Flood by A. McNamara (New York)  4 Stars
November 29, 2009
Margaret Atwood has a vivid imagination. She has once again envisioned a bleak and desolate future. Greedy corporations have reaped enormous profit and power. Gene splicing has created odd and dangerous life forms. The environment has been ruined and violence lurks around every street corner.
The Year of the Flood is a companion piece to Atwood's 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. It is not a sequel, but rather a re-telling from a different point of view. This book is centered on Adam One and his religious sect God's Gardeners. The gardeners revere all life forms as well as the Earth itself. Adam One predicts an upcoming "waterless flood", in which most life on Earth will be destroyed. The Gardeners prepare for this eventuality and do all they can to live an environmentally responsible life.
The "flood" takes the form of a bio-engineered plague which wipes out most of humanity, but spares animal and plant life. God's Gardeners are uniquely suited to survive the plague, and to navigate this new world. The Year of the Flood is told from the point of view of two women who have survived the plague and are struggling to survive.
This novel presents a frightening vision of the future. It is very well-written and worthwhile reading. Once again, Margaret Atwood proves to be a gifted writer. In addition to envisioning a world, Atwood has created the religion of God's Gardeners. Many of the chapters end with hymns from the God's Gardeners Oral Book of Psalms. These have even been recorded! So, if you're not disturbed by the prospect of a dismal future where humankind is destroyed by a terrible plague, then go read this novel.
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Survival by Stephen T. Hopkins (Oak Park, Illinois) 4 Stars
November 25, 2009
Margaret Atwood's new novel, The Year of the Flood, does something that I can't recall her doing before: she reprises characters from a previous novel, and expands their story. Several of the characters from Oryx & Crake, (which I also rated with four stars in 2003), appear in the new novel, and the two novels merge pleasantly to create a more complete view of a future possible world. The Year of the Flood is a story of survival in a world devastated by genetic experiments gone foul, and a plague that wiped out much of the population. One group in The Year of the Flood is called God's Gardeners, and the hymns that Atwood creates describe their beliefs and their world with humor and insight. A collaborator composed music for these fourteen hymns and they can be heard and purchased [...]. Atwood's writing is superb, the characters believable, and the future world she creates is a scary place.
Rating: Four-star (Highly Recommended)
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Memorable, masterful by Judith (Santa Cruz, CA USA)  5 Stars
November 23, 2009
Much of the future that she writes about is already here or looming, which is what makes it so compelling -- not being able to resist watching a train wreck, as someone put it. I read it in one sitting, not because I was breathlessly awaiting a cliffhanger outcome, but because it felt like I was there, on the sidelines, and I couldn't just walk away.
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highly recommended by B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) 5 Stars
November 22, 2009
Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood is set in the same world as her earlier novel Oryx and Crake. Like Oryx and her much 1980's dystopia The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood extrapolates from modern scientific and cultural/social trends to depict a horrifying future. Here we have corporate control (HelthWyzer Corporation), genetic manipulation (one example: the libam -- half lion, half lamb), heavily secure compounds for the well-to-do (the future's "gated" communities), jobs schlepping "burgers" for the less-well-to-do at Secretburgers (with a nod to Soylent Green) or doing "plank work" at SeksMart (say it out loud) or Scales and Tails. The even worse-well-to-do end up disappeared (check those burgers) and criminals are thrown into the Paintball Prison--a combination of incarceration and reality TV. Various religious sects preach their dogma, including a group of vegetarian pacifists known as The Gardeners, who predict the coming "Waterless Flood," which comes in the form of an amazing quick and virulent plague, wiping out much of humanity.
The book opens post-plague with two survivors, both former Gardeners: Ren, who was locked into a secure room at Scales and Tails and so avoided contamination; and Toby, at the AnooYou spa. The book then alternates between real time and flashbacks showing us how the two ended up where they are, using first person for one character and third for the other. Between such chapters we also get sermons from the leader of the Gardeners (Adam One) and Gardener hymns. Along the way, we meet a host of other characters, including the two that would eventually become Oryx and Crake of the earlier book (the events of the two books eventually dovetail to some extent).
This is typical Atwood, which means it all (or near enough all) pretty much just works, seemingly effortlessly. You begin to inhabit this world very early on, nodding your head as you're introduced to yet another reasonable trend forward from our time--it's all fully realized and concrete. The same holds true for the characters as Atwood shifts from one to the other without missing a beat, capturing the inner voice of a young girl or the more confident voice of a group leader with equal sure-footedness, and showing the changes in characters over time in her usual subtle fashion.
The plot is compelling from the start thanks to the use of the split chronology; simply telling it in linear fashion would have necessitated too much intro as the society was explained. This way we get both the world building and the tension of how/if Ren and Toby, two very different personas--one tough, the other gentle-- will survive. Atwood also throws in other tension pre-plague: a viciously violent former boss out for Toby's blood, concern over the Gardener's more illicit activities, and so on. The tension throughout is leavened by humor--sometimes overt, sometimes wry--and the warm relationships among several characters, especially the women.
A gripping story that becomes more so as the book moves on, compelling characters, serious thematic content, a wonderfully inventive not-so-far-flung future--it's all here in The Year of The Flood, one of the my favorite books by one of my favorite authors. Highly recommended.
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The Year of the Flood: A Novel by K. B. Tipton (Albany, NY) 5 Stars
November 21, 2009
I love Margaret Atwood, have been her follower for years. This book sets the scene for an earlier book, "Oryx and Crake." It is a scary and thrilling book, written in several first persons view points.
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