The Heart Goes Last
A Novel
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- 75,00 kr
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—in the gated community of Consilience, residents who sign a contract will get a job and a lovely house for six months of the year...if they serve as inmates in the Positron prison system for the alternate months.
“Captivating...thrilling.” —The New York Times Book Review
Stan and Charmaine, a young urban couple, have been hit by job loss and bankruptcy in the midst of nationwide economic collapse. Forced to live in their third-hand Honda, where they are vulnerable to roving gangs, they think the gated community of Consilience may be the answer to their prayers. At first, this seems worth it: they will have a roof over their heads and food on the table. But when a series of troubling events unfolds, Positron begins to look less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.
The Heart Goes Last is a vivid, urgent vision of development and decay, freedom and surveillance, struggle and hope—and the timeless workings of the human heart.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We imagine it’s not always easy to be Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist who won the Nebula Award for her feminist dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale. The Heart Goes Last is an equally unsettling story of a not-so-distant future gone horribly wrong. In the aftermath of a financial collapse that’s crippled North America, married couple Charmaine and Stan find themselves living in their car and scraping by on tips from Charmaine’s seedy bar job. You can’t blame them for giving up their freedom for a chance to live in Consilience—a gated community that makes inventive use of prison labor—but you know that decision will blow up in their faces. Atwood is a master storyteller, churning up anxiety and painting vivid, nightmarish scenes that linger in the imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the dystopian landscape of the unflappable Atwood's (Stone Mattress) latest novel, there are "not enough jobs, and too many people," which drives married couple Stan and Charmaine to become interested in the Positron Project, a community that purports to have achieved harmony. There is a catch, as Positron leader Ed explains: citizens are required to share their home with other couples, alternating each month between time in prison and time at home. It's an odd arrangement, but one that temporarily satisfies Charmaine and Stan until they each fall in love with the alternates they're supposed to never see; their infatuations put the entire Positron arrangement into question. Atwood is fond of intricate plot work, and the novel takes a long time to set up the action, but once it hits the last third, it gains an unstoppable momentum. The novel is full of sly moments of peripeteia and lots of sex, which play alongside larger ideas about the hidden monsters lurking in facile totalitarianism, and, as implied by the title, the ability of the heart to keep fighting despite long odds.
