The Heart Goes Last

The pounding of the heart echoes throughout Margaret Atwood’s engrossing 56th book, beating in fear that it will soon beat no more... This visceral study of desperation and desire journeys into the dark heart of greed, exploitation and brutality... It is filled with passages of great intellectual and emotional acuity, appealing both to the head and to the heart.

No living writer does dystopia with more panache than the incomparable Margaret Atwood.

Atwood is the consummate storyteller, slinging out well-aimed barbs as she reels her readers in to this tale of suburban utopia gone horribly wrong... There’s a good deal of sly wit... But despite all that it has a deadly serious message: we humans are all too easily lulled into a soporific acceptance leaving us wide open for exploitation. And its ending is a triumph.

The Heart Goes Last is at once thrilling, funny, grim - and shockingly convincing.

It’s gloriously mad cap […] you only pause in your laughter when you realise that, in its constituent parts, the world she depicts here is all too horribly plausible.

It is not a soothing read, although a compelling and darkly comic one - serious and sinister, subtle and shrewd.

Awfully good

Mordant humour and scouring satire

She is the undisputed queen of dystopian fiction and Margaret Atwood's latest offering is as deliciously disturbing as her dedicated fanbase could hope for.

A powerful novel that shows us the worst excesses of where our society could lead

Readable, fast-paced and packed with disturbing imagery, this book will win Atwood a new generation of readers.

Brilliantly done, as gripping as it is chilling. It is also extremely funny. It is hard to think of many writers who could incorporate a partial reworking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a narrative strand that involves sexbots, blue teddy bears and a lookalike Elvis who wets his pants. It is hard to think, too, of many writers who could explore such deadly serious themes — the struggle between freedom and security, the excesses of capitalism, the erosion of privacy — with such extraordinary lightness of touch. But this is Margaret Atwood. She has a brain the size of a (dystopian) planet. And her prose sings.

Atwood, despite that mysterious smile, always provokes [...] The Heart Goes Last is a novel to think about carefully, even if you're tempted to hurl it against a wall. I loved it.

As savvy as ever

Atwood had me feeling like I was blindfolded on a rollercoaster. And I just didn't want to get off.

An imagination without equal.

Sheer fun, with a sharp edge.

Atwood has long reigned over magical realism fiction - The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin are set texts for aspiring feminists. Her new novel deserves equal fanfare

Clever, witty, speculative dystopian fiction I found pretty disturbing.

Darkly funny and tremendously thought-provoking, it is a joy to read.