The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood is a brilliant visionary imagining of the future that calls to mind her classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

Adam One, the kindly leader of God’s Gardeners — a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion — 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 been spared: Ren, a young trapeze-dancer, locked inside a high-end sex club; and one of God’s Gardeners, Toby, who is barricaded inside a luxurious spa. Have others survived?

By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and witty, The Year of the Flood unfolds Toby’s and Ren’s stories during the years prior to their meeting again. The novel not only brilliantly reflects to us a world we recognize but poignantly reminds us of our enduring humanity.

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NOMINEE 2009 - Scotiabank Giller Prize

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“This is a gutsy and expansive novel, rich with ideas and conceits, but overall it’s more optimistic than Oryx & Crake. Its characters have a compassion and energy lacking in Jimmy, the wounded and floating lothario at the previous novel's center. Each novel can be enjoyed independently of the other, but what’s perhaps most impressive is the degree of connection between them. Together they form halves of a single epic…”
— Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

“The tremendous imaginative power of [Atwood’s] fiction allows us to believe that anything is possible.”
— New York Times Book Review

“Trust Margaret Atwood to put her finger on the pulse of the future….”
— Globe and Mail

“Atwood is a natural seer for an age that does not want to look too closely at what it condones, or refuses to see.”
— Glasgow Herald

“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. The novel shows the Nobel Prize-worthy Margaret Atwood at the pinnacle of her prodigious creative powers.”
— Elle Magazine

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Visit The Year of the Flood website.

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Margaret Atwood’s internationally bestselling fiction includes The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. She has received numerous awards and honours, including the Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and The Giller Prize. She lives in Toronto.

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