The founder of the group, Adam One, is a charismatic leader who strongly supports the practice of nonviolent, ecologically oriented resistance to the cruel corporations causing environmental destruction. This is where Toby and Ren live, as they are both members of a religious group called the God’s Gardeners. Yet while the events of the first novel take place in the Compounds and its narrative centers on the elite scientific community, The Year of the Flood is set in poor neighborhoods called pleeblands, where violence and abuse are omnipresent. Like Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood begins just after the massive pandemic and then retrospectively describes the corrupt world that laid the foundation for it. Toby isolates herself from the virus inside a luxurious spa called AnooYoo. Ren, a young trapeze dancer, survives the pandemic by being locked in the Sticky Zone, a quarantine room in a high-end sex club called Scales and Tails. This fractured narrative foregrounds the reasons for the pandemic alongside the trials of those who survive the deadly virus. As the novel’s main third-person narrators, they recount their present circumstances as well as their pasts. The novel tells the story of Toby and Ren, two survivors of a devastating human-made plague, the long-feared Waterless Flood that obliterated most human life.

The flood margaret atwood