The Heart Goes Last

Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last (2015) is set in a near-future America where economic collapse has hollowed out entire regions, leaving couples like Stan and Charmaine living in their car, parking lot to parking lot, avoiding gangs and waiting for something to change. The change arrives in the form of the Positron Project, a corporate social experiment built around the town of Consilience: sign up, and you get a house, a job, and a stable life, with one catch. Residents alternate monthly between civilian life and a stint as inmates in the town's for-profit prison, each household sharing its home with another couple on the opposite rotation. The arrangement is sold as mutual benefit, and for a while it works, until Stan and Charmaine begin pulling at the threads of what Consilience is actually built on. The novel gets stranger and darker from there, incorporating sex robots, organ harvesting, behavioral modification, and an Elvis-themed entertainment complex, all rendered in a register that is more darkly comic than the authoritarian dread of The Handmaid's Tale. It is a sharper, more satirical book, less interested in the mechanics of state control than in the willingness of ordinary people to trade freedom for comfort.

Signed copy. Canadian first edition, published by McClelland & Stewart, issued simultaneously with the American edition. Signed by Atwood on the title page.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2015. ISBN: 9780771009112. #11259.
Fine in fine dust jacket.