Books by Margaret Atwood

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free.

Margaret Atwood puts the human heart to the ultimate test in an utterly brilliant new novel that is as visionary as The Handmaid's Tale and as richly imagined as The Blind Assassin. Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of an economic and soci...al collapse. Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around--and fast. The Positron Project in the town of Consilience seems to be the answer to their prayers. No one is unemployed and everyone gets a comfortable, clean house to live in . . . for six months out of the year. On alternating months, residents of Consilience must leave their homes and function as inmates in the Positron prison system. Once their month of service in the prison is completed, they can return to their civilian homes. At first, this doesn't seem like too much of a sacrifice to make in order to have a roof over one's head and food to eat. But when Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who lives in their house during the months when she and Stan are in the prison, a series of troubling events unfolds, putting Stan's life in danger. With each passing day, Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.
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From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays -- funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient -- which seek answers to Burning Questions such as- Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? How much of yourself can you give away ...without evaporating? How can we live on our planet? Is it true? And is it fair? What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at our world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer- only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better questioner of the many and varied mysteries of our human universe. 'Brilliant and funny' Joan Didion 'She's taken our times and made us wise to them' Ali Smith 'Lights a fire from the fears of our age . . . Miraculously balances humor, outrage, and beauty' New York Times Book Review 'All over the reading world, the history books are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood's name is written at the top of it' Anne Enright, Guardian 'The outstanding novelist of our age' Sunday Times ** A 2022 Book to Look Forward To in The Times, i, Financial Times, Guardian, Evening Standard, New Statesman, Cosmopolitan and SheerLuxe **
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Set in a Lower East Side tenement in the early days of the pandemic, Fourteen Days is a dazzling, heartwarming novel with an unusual twist: each character has been secretly written by a different, major literary voice - from Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston to Dave Eggers and ...Celeste Ng. One week into the COVID-19 shutdown, tenants of a Lower East Side apartment building in Manhattan have begun to gather on the rooftop and tell stories. With each passing night, more and more neighbours gather, bringing chairs and milk crates and overturned pails. Gradually the tenants - some of whom have barely spoken to each other - become real neighbours. In this Decameron-like serial novel, general editor Margaret Atwood, Authors Guild president Douglas Preston, and a star-studded list of contributors create a beautiful ode to the people who couldn't get away from the city when the pandemic hit. A dazzling, heartwarming collection, Fourteen Days reveals how beneath the loss and suffering, some communities managed to become stronger.
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Penelope's slyly brilliant side of the story, from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale