The Year of the Flood is the second instalment in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy, which began with Oryx and Crake and finished with MaddAddam, depicting the lead up to and fallout from a virus that effects the destruction of civilisation and threatens to make the human species extinct.  After the disaster described in Oryx, in this book we follow – via flashbacks – members of a cult-like religious-cum-scientific community who are devoted to protecting plant and animal life and predict the coming apocalypse.  In MaddAddam‘s denouement, Atwood imagines how the world can rebuild itself.

further reading…

• The New York Times review of The Year of the Flood
• The New Yorker’s review of Oryx and Crake
• NPR’s review of MaddAddam