The Year of the Flood - by Margaret Atwood

This is quite a long, somewhat complex book, with a great many characters and it is told from the viewpoint, though in the third person, of two of them. This all fits together very coherently and I was never lost or particularly confused. The book hooked me in quite quickly and I was soon turning the pages wanting to know where it was going. The dystopian world seems bleak, but not without hope. I was intrigued by the hint of it being in the fairly near future - I'm guessing 2050 or thereabouts - as technology has moved on, but is not unrecognizable.

Someone told me that it is part 2 of a trilogy. I think it is more accurate to say that there is a set of 3 books, all set in the same "universe" and featuring some of the same characters. I am highly motivated to read the other too before long.

Overall, I greatly admired the quality of writing; for me, the author living up to her reputation. I will transcribe a short passage in illustration:

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism to meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct to reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.