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Margaret Atwood discusses new novel, The Year of the Flood, which focuses on a group that appears in the background of Atwood's 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake: the God's Gardeners, who attempt to reconcile religion, science, and nature. The piece begins in Gardener Year Twenty-five, when much of the human race has been obliterated in a man-made pandemic. Two women have survived: Toby, once a Gardener, is now hiding out in a luxury spa, and Ren, once a Gardener child, is walled up in a high-end sex club. From this point, we return to Year Five, with Adam One, the Gardener leader, and his small group of Gardeners, who live and garden on a slum roof-top, menaced not only by the criminal activities around them but by the official powers of the future -- the CorpSeCorps, representing the combination corporations and government that now control society.

Margaret Atwood herself plays the Narrator, taking us from Year Twenty-Five back to Year Five, then forward in time.