The novel moves between Toby's everyday life among the Gardeners, and the story her lover Zeb tells about his past and that of his brother Adam, founder of the Gardeners. At times, Atwood's prose becomes so bitingly satirical and whimsical that it's reminiscent of literary science fiction writer Joanna Russ, whose book The Female Man is an astonishing blend of multiverse hopping and bitter feminist comedy. Post-apocalyptic life, observes our Gardener protagonist Toby, is kind of like high school.

Yes, there is a search for meaning and spiritual sustenance here, but there are also petty jealousies among the Gardeners and arguments over who will do the chores. What's delightful about this novel is that Atwood always balances philosophically weighty topics with a humorous realism. The only other creatures they have for company are the strange, childlike Crakers, who worship their all-too-human makers as gods.

Plus, their leader Adam has disappeared, leaving no instructions for how to deal with the world after the 'waterless flood' he predicted. Without any target for their wrath, the Gardeners are searching for meaning.

But as the novel opens, all their enemies in the evil nature-destroying corporations are dead. Now, in MaddAddam, we discover that the Gardeners are among the only survivors of the pandemic - partly because their religion taught them survival skills, and partly because many of them worked with Crake on the destruction of humanity.Įither way, they were prepared. In Year, we met the Gardeners, a group of eco-spiritualists who practice a kind of environmental animism. Like Year of the Flood, MaddAddam deals with the question of how to rebuild a better civilization in the ashes of what came before. That mad scientist is the brilliant bioengineer Crake, whose story is retold in this novel by the Crakers, the post-humans he designed to experience no sexual jealousy, and to eat nothing but plants. Like its predecessors, MaddAddam is a blend of satiric futurism and magic realism, a snarky but soulful peek at what happens to the world after a mad scientist decimates humanity with a designer disease. With her weird, wistful new novel MaddAddam, Margaret Atwood completes the apocalyptic trilogy she began with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title MaddAddam Author Margaret Atwood

Year of the flood trilogy