Their coupling is furtive and joyless and their prospects more than bleak. Stan has to keep the key in the ignition at all times so that they can flee at a moment’s notice as soon as marauding gangs approach. The couple end up having to live and sleep in their car. The Heart Goes Last provides a less blatantly post-apocalyptic scenario than Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy but it opens with an atmosphere that is at least as threatening, if not more so. The unemployment rate in the hardest hit East Coast area has soared up to 40%, almost twice the rate that America reached in the wake of the Wall Street Crash. The America inhabited by her focal characters, Stan and Charmaine, is steeped in the twenty-first century equivalent of the Great Depression. Reworked from an e-serial, Atwood’s latest novel is as captivating and humorous as her previous work.
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