The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood

We are back in the post-apocalyptic world introduced in the author’s earlier work Oryx and Crake where few have survived the deadly pandemic, Oryx unwittingly unleashed.

Toby has survived and is holed up on a rooftop garden, with access to food and water for now. Ren’s survival is due to a temporary stay in an isolation facility that saved her from infection. It caters to her every need, but the bad news is that she is locked inside and everyone outside seems to be dead.

We get each girl’s back story, Toby in the third person and Ren in the first. And they have a connection – both had spells as members of the ‘God’s Gardeners’ religious cult that preached self-sufficiency (useful now!), environmental awareness, and the inevitable demise of humanity in a ‘waterless flood’, which has come to pass in the form of the pandemic.

Toby and Ren’s pasts teem with characters and action against a backdrop of an all too believable future where current societal trends come to fruition. Global corporations dominate a bipolar society of the haves, who work for them, and the have nots, who don’t.

How Toby and Ren got where they are, and whether they will remain isolated or manage to make contact with other survivors, provide a strong narrative hook that engages the full 500 pages.

Roll on vlume three of the trilogy – MaddAddam.

Emma – Jane Austen

Set in the Regency world of country houses and formality we have, centre stage, Emma Woodhouse. Young, attractive, comfortably off living with her widowed father, and it has to be said, a little spoilt. She acknowledges that, and is bent on self-improvement, almost as much as she is bent on improvement of others.

Such as Harriet Smith, ‘natural’ if inconvenient daughter of some man with means enough to place her out of the way but in a respectable position. Emma soon has plans for Harriet, which do not include marriage ‘beneath her’ to a local farmer. She thinks Harriet can do better, spikes the proposal, and steers her protégé towards the new vicar, Mr Elton.

Emma, herself, is more than eligible, but has declared that she will not marry, as that would entail leaving her home and father, over both of which she has free rein. She is happy in her circle that includes her old governess, now married locally to Mr Weston, her sister married to Mr John Knightly with two children, and her brother-in-law, the other Mr Knightly, an established bachelor who holds the family seat at Donwell Abbey. Also tolerated are two spinsters, Mrs. and Miss Bates. When Emma, for the benefit of Harriet, draws Mr Elton into the fold she miscalculates the effect.

Two newcomers arrive independently to spice up life in the village. Come to stay with the Bates’ is Miss Jane Fairfax, young, attractive, and as equally accomplished as Emma if somewhat inferior in pedigree. She soon turns a few heads. Visiting the Westons, albeit infrequently and briefly, is Frank Churchill, a sociable and engaging young man, who despite the surname is Mr Weston’s son by an earlier marriage. The ladies find him charming, including to her surprise, Emma. Mr Knightly has his reservations.

There is much polite conversation while sat in drawing rooms or walking in gardens; a few letters are exchanged; and fleeting bodily contact occurs during a dance. Some confusion and misunderstanding along with hints of forthcoming proposals, keep the plot alive (just).

All very, well, Jane Austen. Wordy to the modern reader, so rather buries its wit in verbiage, but it is another classic ticked off the Book-et List.Set in the Regency world of country houses and formality we have, centre stage, Emma Woodhouse. Young, attractive, comfortably off living with her widowed father, and it has to be said, a little spoilt. She acknowledges that, and is bent on self-improvement, almost as much as she is bent on improvement of others.