The Heart Goes Last: A Novel

The Heart Goes Last: A Novel

Margaret Atwood

Language: English

Pages: 400

ISBN: 1101912367

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


One of the Best Books of the Year: The Boston Globe

Stan and Charmaine, a young urban couple, have been hit by job loss and bankruptcy in the midst of a nationwide economic collapse. Forced to live in their third-hand Honda, where they are vulnerable to roving gangs, they think the gated community of Consilience may be the answer to their prayers. If they sign a life contract, they’ll get a job and a lovely house . . . for six months out of the year. On alternating months, residents must leave their homes and serve as inmates in the Positron prison system. At first, this seems worth it: they will have a roof over their heads and food on the table. But when a series of troubling events unfolds, Positron begins to look less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled. The Heart Goes Last is a vivid, urgent vision of development and decay, freedom and surveillance, struggle and hope—and the timeless workings of the human heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

chapel, and Ed has removed the hand, and the door on his side is being opened from the outside, not by the driver but by a man in a black suit. Then her own door is opened, and Ed helps her out. There’s a crowd gathered outside, with that muted look—like stuffed cloth—that people waiting for funerals used to have. Her grandmother’s funeral, for instance, back when ceremonies like this were still done properly in the outside world. Before people stopped putting the money into them, before they

kind of hymn. If they play “My Way,” like in some of the Consilience TV funerals, she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to tolerate it. Dying like that was not Stan’s idea of his way, not in a million years! Bite your tongue, Charmaine, she tells herself. Just pretend you’re at the hairdresser’s. The coffin is closed, due to the hideous burns that Stan is supposed to have sustained as he threw himself upon the defective main switch in an attempt to turn off the power, then frizzled as the current

more relaxed now—nobody seems to suspect him of not being Waldo—so he can risk a few offhand questions. “The voice options are great,” says Derek. “You can have silent or, like, moans and screams, even a few words: more, harder, like that.” “In my book it’s not the same,” says Gary, head on one side as if tasting some new foodstuff. “I didn’t go for it that much, myself. It was too, you know, mechanical. But some guys prefer it. No worries if you fuck up.” “So to speak,” says Tyler, and they

thinking you might someday have a real guest, like an in-law or an old high school friend, people who you hoped wouldn’t stay long, and they most likely hoped it too, but still, it was nice to catch up—just thinking about it was a comfort. She tried to see Aurora as that sort of a guest, instead of a spy in disguise; and that was when she finally went to sleep. * * * “Rise and shine,” says Aurora’s voice. Darn it if she isn’t barging in the door, carrying Charmaine’s tray with Charmaine’s

down at the mug: Aurora has given her the happy gnome. She feels tears trickling down her cheeks. Oh, no, not more crying; she really doesn’t have the strength for it. Why had they wanted to kill Stan? He hadn’t done anything, he wasn’t a subversive element; unless he’d been hiding something from her. But he was so simple, so easy to read … On the other hand, that’s what he’d thought about her, and look how much she’d hidden from him. Maybe he’d found out something about Positron, something

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