The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Desperate for a job, she begins to work at a mob-run restaurant chain called SecretBurger. After her mother dies from a mysterious disease and her father commits suicide, Toby becomes orphaned and homeless. While both women are isolated and unaware of whether anyone else except them survived, readers learn more about their prepandemic lives. At the same time, Ren is waiting for someone to open the Sticky Zone room she is in from the outside, and she passes time by reminiscing about her former life. Isolated in the AnooYoo Spa, she tries to sustain herself by keeping a garden, but her efforts are jeopardized by pigoons, a breed of genetically modified pigs that have human brain tissue. When the novel opens, Toby is struggling to survive in the wake of the pandemic that destroyed almost all humanity.

Each part opens with a sermon from Adam One that sheds light on the Gardeners’ religious doctrine and is followed by alternating stories from Toby and Ren’s lives. The founder of the group, Adam One, is a charismatic leader who strongly supports the practice of nonviolent, ecologically oriented resistance to the cruel corporations causing environmental destruction. This is where Toby and Ren live, as they are both members of a religious group called the God’s Gardeners. Yet while the events of the first novel take place in the Compounds and its narrative centers on the elite scientific community, The Year of the Flood is set in poor neighborhoods called pleeblands, where violence and abuse are omnipresent. Like Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood begins just after the massive pandemic and then retrospectively describes the corrupt world that laid the foundation for it. Toby isolates herself from the virus inside a luxurious spa called AnooYoo. Ren, a young trapeze dancer, survives the pandemic by being locked in the Sticky Zone, a quarantine room in a high-end sex club called Scales and Tails. This fractured narrative foregrounds the reasons for the pandemic alongside the trials of those who survive the deadly virus. As the novel’s main third-person narrators, they recount their present circumstances as well as their pasts. The novel tells the story of Toby and Ren, two survivors of a devastating human-made plague, the long-feared Waterless Flood that obliterated most human life.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood