The Heart Goes Last

CRAMPED

Sleeping in the car is cramped. Being a third-hand Honda, it s no palace to begin with. If it was a van they d have more room, but fat chance of affording one of those, even back when they thought they had money. Stan says they re lucky to have any kind of a car at all, which is true, but their luckiness doesn t make the car any bigger.

Charmaine feels that Stan ought to sleep in the back because he needs more space--it would only be fair, he s larger--but he has to be in the front in order to drive them away fast in an emergency. He doesn t trust Charmaine s ability to function under those circumstances: he says she d be too busy screaming to drive. So Charmaine can have the more spacious back, though even so she has to curl up like a snail because she can t exactly stretch out.

They keep the windows mostly closed because of the mosquitoes and the gangs and the solitary vandals. The solitaries don t usually have guns or knives--if they have those kinds of weapons you have to get out of there triple fast--but they re more likely to be bat-shit crazy, and a crazy person with a piece of metal or a rock or even a high-heeled shoe can do a lot of damage. They ll think you re a demon or the undead or a vampire whore, and no kind of reasonable thing you might do to calm them down will cancel out that opinion. The best thing with crazy people, Grandma Win used to say--the only thing, really--is to be somewhere else.

With the windows shut except for a crack at the top, the air gets dead and supersaturated with their own smells. There aren t many places where they can grab a shower or wash their clothes, and that makes Stan irritable. It makes Charmaine irritable too, but she tries her best to stamp on that feeling and look on the bright side, because what s the use of complaining?

What s the use of anything? she often thinks. But what s the use of even thinking What s the use? So instead she says, Honey, let s just cheer up!

Why? Stan might say.

Margaret Atwood

Captivating. . . . Thrilling. . . . Margaret Atwood [is] a living legend. The New York Times Book Review

Quintessential Atwood. . . . The writing here is so persuasive, so crisp, that it seeps under your skin. The Boston Globe

An arresting perspective on the confluence of information, freedom, and security in the modern age. The New Yorker
 
A gripping, psychologically acute portrayal of our own future gone totally wrong, and the eternal constant of flawed humanity. Huffington Post

Dystopia virtuoso Margaret Atwood turns her effortless world-building, deft humor and grim commentary on the depths of human hubris to the prison industrial complex, love and free will. The Denver Post

Rare apocalyptic entertainment. . . . Not only does Atwood sketch out an all-too-possible future but she also looks to the past, tapping into archetypes from fairy tales and myth, giving the novel a resonance beyond satire. The Miami Herald

Another Atwood classic. St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Poignant. . . . Gloriously madcap. . . . You only pause in your laughter when you realise that, in its constituent parts, the world she depicts here is all too horribly plausible. The Guardian (London)

  Engrossing. The Austin Chronicle

Wonderful. . . . Explores the idea of a powerful system and its discontents. . . . Atwood s The Heart Goes Last is a riveting addition to her oeuvre. Electric Literature

Atwood s creepy but entertaining vision of a possible future. The Washington Times

Fast-paced and funny. . . . True love ultimately endures in The Heart Goes Last, but so do the real terrors present in Atwood novels, all too often manifesting in ours. PopMatters
 
Eerily prophetic. . . . A heady blend of speculative fiction with noir undertones that is provocative, powerful and will prompt all readers to reassess which parts of their humanity are for sale. BookPage

Ever-inventive, astutely observant, and drolly ironic,