From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale

Imagining a world where citizens take turns as prisoners and jailers, the prophetic Margaret Atwood delivers a hilarious yet harrowing tale about liberty, power, and the irrepressibility of the human appetite.

Several years after the world's brutal economic collapse, Stan and Charmaine, a married couple struggling to stay afloat, hear about the Positron Project in the town of Consilience, an experiment in cooperative living that appears to be the answer to their problems—to living in their car, to the lousy jobs, to the vandalism and the gangs, to their piled-up debt. There's just one drawback: once inside Consilience, you don't get out.

After weighing their limited options, Stan and Charmaine sign up, and soon they find themselves involved in the town's strategy for economic stability: a pervasive prison system, whereby each citizen lives a double life, as a prisoner one month, and a guard or town functionary the next. At first, Stan and Charmaine enjoy their newfound prosperity. But when Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who shares her civilian house, her actions set off an unexpected chain of events that leave Stan running for his life. Brilliant, dark, and provocative, The Heart Goes Last is a compelling futuristic vision that will drive readers to the edge of their seats.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. 

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A National Post Best Book
A Globe and Mail Best Book
"Atwood's prose miraculously balances humor, outrage and beauty. A simple description becomes both chilling and sublime." —New York Times Book Review
"An arresting perspective on the confluence of information, freedom, and security in the modern age." —The New Yorker
"Quintessential Atwood. . . . The writing here is so persuasive, so crisp, that it seeps under your skin." —The Boston Globe

"Atwood will always be her own best competition. . . . A gripping, psychologically acute portrayal of our own future gone totally wrong, and the eternal constant of flawed humanity." —Huffington Post

"Hard to put down, and in this new 'novel of ideas'—a literary genre at which she excels—Atwood has demonstrated, yet again, that she is in a class of her own in the creation of a parallel universe that is both chilling, thought-provoking and hilariously funny all at once. . . . A delicious series of plot twists and turns." —Toronto Star
“Deeply witty and oddly beautiful. . . . In a book so inventive, its most compelling aspect is really the ever-fluctuating love and loathing of its principal characters. . . . Belongs on the same hallowed list Brave New World, 1984, and Atwood’s masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale. . . . [A] whole lot of quirky, poppy fun.” —The Globe and Mail
"Margaret Atwood is one of literature's greatest living interior decorators. . . . In rearranging [her characters'] mental furniture and dusting the cobwebbed corners of their consciousness, she often comes across complicated truths about human nature." —NPR

"Dystopia virtuoso Margaret Atwood turns her effortless world-building, deft humour, 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." —Miami Herald

"Another Atwood classic." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Gloriously madcap. . . . Poignant. . . . 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

"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 [our lives]." —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
"A jarring, rewardingly strange piece of work. At first a classic Atwood dystopia, rationally imagined and developed, it relaxes suddenly into a kind of surrealist adventure. . . . Atwood allows her sense of the absurd its full elbow room. . . . [A] jubilant comedy of errors, bizarre bedroom farce, SF prison-break thriller, psychedelic 60s crime caper: The Heart Goes Last scampers in and out of all of these genres." —The Guardian

"Ever-inventive, astutely observant, and drolly ironic, Atwood unfurls a riotous plot. . . . This laser- sharp, hilariously campy, and swiftly flowing satire delves deeply into our desires, vices, biases, and contradictions, bringing fresh, incisive comedy to the rising tide of post-apocalyptic fiction . . . in which Atwood has long been a clarion voice.” —Booklist (starred review)