The Heart Goes Last: Margaret Atwood - Softcover

Gloriously madcap . . . You only pause in your laughter when you realise that, in its constituent parts, the world she depicts here is all too horribly plausible (Stephanie Merritt Observer)

Her eye for the most unpredictable caprices of the human heart and her narrative fearlessness have made her one of the world's most celebrated novelists (Naomi Alderman Guardian)

The bestselling author who shot to fame 30 years ago with The Handmaid's Tale is still at her darkly comic best (Sunday Times)

Atwood's gift is to take what's already out there and nudge it to the next level . . . The Heart Goes Last is all at once thrilling, funny, grim - and shockingly convincing (Erica Wagner Harper's Bazaar)

What distinguishes Atwood's apocalypticism is her insistence that we have brought it on ourselves. It's not meteor strikes, or aliens that destroy our world. It's us . . . I loved it (John Sutherland The Times)

Jubilant comedy of errors, bizarre bedroom farce, SF prison-break thriller, psychedelic sixties crime caper: The Heart Goes Last scampers in and out of all of these genres, pausing only to quote Milton on the loss of Eden or Shakespeare on weddings. Meanwhile, it performs a hard-eyed autopsy on themes of impersonation and self-impersonation, revealing so many layers of contemporary deception and self-deception that we don't know whether to laugh or cry (Guardian)

This visceral study of desperation and desire journeys into the dark heart of greed, exploitation and brutality, as it portrays a project that is "an infringement of individual liberties, an attempt at total social control, an insult to the human spirit". It is filled with passages of great intellectual and emotional acuity, appealing both to the head and to the heart (Anita Sethi Observer)