The Heart Goes Last with Margaret Atwood
Hosted by CBC's Alan Neal
Atwood's prose miraculously balances humor, outrage and beauty. A simple description becomes both chilling and sublime.
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.
This event is organized in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts to mark the 2015 edition of the Governor General’s Literary Awards.