“The Year of the Flood”

Bordering on science fiction, Margaret Atwood’s “The Year of the Flood” candidly depicts a harrowing future. Including a few characters who appeared in her previous novel, “Oryx and Crake,” her latest is filled with gadgets and concepts that are frightfully familiar. The Christian Science Monitor writes, “It’s as dark and apocalyptic as anything a Cormac McCarthy or Aldous Huxley could dream up.” The Washington Post says, “By its last half ‘The Year of the Flood’ has turned into a heart-pounding thriller, a desperate Painball game to the death set in an already devastated world.” Yet the fiction is not so far from reality. With satirical humor and her astute insights into humanity, Atwood projects a future that demands an examination of the present. The San Francisco Chronicle writes, “‘The Year of the Flood’ serves as an old-fashioned alarm (moral, ecological), a zombie thriller and a series of swashbuckling pokes at modern institutions.”