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Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood

Ages 16+

Readers rate it 3.9 (398 on Hardcover)

434 pages · Released 2009

Content report card

Year of the Flood parent’s guide: what’s inside

High confidence

What it offers

Positive messages

Positive role models

Educational value

A note for parents

Year of the Flood is a sophisticated dystopian novel intended for adult readers, not YA audiences. It contains significant violence (including sexual violence and murder), mature sexual content, substance use, and deeply unsettling themes about human cruelty and environmental collapse. While Atwood explores meaningful ideas about community, faith, and survival through complex characters, the content demands reader maturity and emotional resilience well beyond typical teen readers. This is a challenging literary work best suited for older teens or adults capable of engaging with its bleak vision critically.

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From the publisher

The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power. The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners-... The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power. The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners--a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life--has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers... Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away... By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.

Shelved under

  • Fiction
  • Regression (Civilization)
  • Environmental disasters
  • Literature
  • Science Fiction & Fantasy
  • Dystopias
  • Genetic engineering
  • Friendship
  • New York Times reviewed
  • Fiction, science fiction, general
  • Canadian fiction (fictional works by one author)
  • Fiction, dystopian

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ISBN 9781408804858 · Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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