The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

A Dystopian thriller that’s not for the squeamish.

Set at some unspecified point in the near future, Year of the Flood follows a loosely-connected group of characters trying to navigate and survive a dystopian future. The world is run by corporations who happy to carry out genetic research on the population and extinguishing any people or groups who get in their way. One of these groups is the Gardeners – a church of religious vegans who believe that the world will be decimated by the flood: a global pandemic that will kill a sizeable proportion of the world’s population.

And as it turns out, they were right on the money.

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Book review: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Somehow, describing this as the ‘long-awaited sequel’ doesn’t quite cover it. I’ve had this on preorder for MONTHS. As I’m sure you know, The Testaments is the follow up to the enormously successful, and worryingly prophetic, Handmaid’s Tale – the story of a dystopic America, where a huge swathe of the country is under the control of a totalitarian government that has removed the rights of woman to exist as individuals. (Seriously, if you’ve never heard of this book then I think you may be on the wrong blog).

The Testaments carries on a few years after the last book left off, delving deeper into the world of Gilead from the point of view of women living within it, and outside. It’s not the same literary horror story we saw in the first instalment (or indeed, the tv series), so I don’t think it carries the same shock value I remember from reading The Handmaid’s Tale, though now I get less of a sense of ‘this could happen!’ and more of a sense of ‘I think it already has.’

The writing is much lighter, with less of the literary flair we saw in June’s account of her life as a handmaid. What does come across is the hypocrisy of the entire Gilead setup, and the sense that many of the original characters (Aunt Lydia in particular) are perhaps just as much victims as the handmaids; they were just better survivors.

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