In 2009, when novelist Margaret Atwood released The Year of the Flood, her highly anticipated sequel to 2003’s Oryx and Crake, theoretical interest was intense. For most readers of Oryx and Crake, its haunting story of a world depopulated by a genocidal scientist (Crake) who develops and introduces a new species of genetically-engineered man to repopulate the barren world was a narrative of a frightening and fantastic future.

But where Atwood wrote that earlier novel from a mostly patrician male perspective of scientists living and working in corporate compounds, The Year of the Flood shifted to a female-focused story of a communal eco-cult squatting in a commoners’ zone, or “pleeblands,” that survives a plague along with the experimental humanoid “Crakers.”

Atwood’s shift towards a religious, ecological, prefigurative community was jarring to many readers excited by Crake’s apocalyptic vision and skeptical of the viability of autonomous political projects.Flood fully immerses the reader in the ritual and romance of daily life in the eco-cult, God’s Gardeners: their rooftop gardens, hymns and holidays for various saints (Jane Goodall, Stephen Jay Gould), mushroom foraging, beekeeping, rooftop gardening and preparations of various stockpiles to protect and feed them in the wake of a forthcoming “waterless flood.”