The Year of the Flood is a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood , the second book of her dystopian trilogy, released on September 22, , in Canada and the United States, and on September 7, , in the United Kingdom. The book focuses on a religious sect called God's Gardeners, a small community of survivors of the same biological catastrophe depicted in Atwood's earlier novel Oryx and Crake. The earlier novel contained several brief references to the group. The novel is told through the perspective of protagonists Ren and Toby, with the main characters of Oryx and Crake , including Jimmy and Crake having minor roles.
Atwood continues to explore the effect of science and technology that has caused this plagued world, focusing on the theme of religion through the environmentally focused religious movement of God's Gardeners. It answers some of the questions of Oryx and Crake , develops and further elaborates upon several of the characters in the first book, and reveals the identity of the three human figures who appear at the end of the earlier book.
This is the second of Atwood's trilogy, with the final book being MaddAddam. The Year of the Flood details the events of Oryx and Crake from the perspective of the lower classes in the pleeblands , specifically the God's Gardeners who live in a commune at the Edencliff Rooftop Garden.
God's Gardeners are a religious sect that combines some Biblical practices and beliefs with some scientific practices and beliefs. They are vegetarians devoted to honoring and preserving all plant and animal life, and they predict a human species-ending disaster, which they call "The Waterless Flood". This prediction becomes true in a sense, as Crake's viral pandemic destroys human civilization. God's Gardeners have their own set of saints, all honoured for their environmental activism, such as Saint Dian Fossey and Saint Rachel Carson.
The plot follows two characters, Toby and Ren, whose stories intertwine with each other and, at points, with major characters from Oryx and Crake. Much of the story is told through flashbacks with the two main characters separately surviving the apocalypse described in the previous novel, each reminiscing about their time in God's Gardeners and the events that led to their current situations. Atwood uses third-person narration for Toby's accounts and first-person narration for Ren's.
