The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Atwood returns to her post apocalyptic 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, where science-specifically genetic engineering has run amok.

While Oryx and Crake focused on two teenage boys who grew up in the wealthy compounds, the new novel features two girls who were involved the religious group that combined religion and nature, God’s Gardners.

Toby and Ren are spared from the Waterless Flood that has wiped out most of the human population outside the compounds. Toby survived because she was holed up in the spa where she worked and now she is living alone inside the gates of the spa, protecting herself from the jungle that sprouted outside in the city.

Ren was a trapeze artist who worked at a sex club called Scales and Tails and was protected because she was in an isolation chamber to see if she was infected by a client.

The Year of the Flood is interesting because it deals with the same issues as Oryx and Crake like gene splicing, but it also gives you background that wasn’t explained in the first book. It is not a sequal because it takes place during the same time as the first book.

Atwood paints a wonderfully chilling portrait of the future, like she has excellently done in the past with A Handmaid’s Tale.

Additionally, seventy-year-old Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, could teach her successors a few things about online promotion. To help generate attention for her latest novel, THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD, Margaret Atwood is blogging,tweeting and creating a YouTube contest.

Here is an interview she did with Reuters about her latest online activity.