Cover of The Year of the Flood
And the first book read in 2011 is … The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, a companion volume to Oryx and Crake, which I read last year and absolutely loved. Neither one is exactly a happy book; they deal with a dystopian future and the aftermath of an apocalyptic epidemic. Atwood is such a brilliant writer; she jumps back and forth in time and from narrator to narrator to slowly snap together the pieces of the puzzle so that the reader goes from knowing nothing about what’s going on to knowing … well, not everything, but quite a bit in the end.
The Year of the Flood is not a sequel; it parallels the action of Oryx and Crake with glimpses of the characters from the previous book. The ending, like that of Oryx and Crake is ambiguous and left dangling, leading me to believe that at third book is in the works.
