Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004-2021

** A 2022 Book to Look Forward To in The Times, i, Financial Times, Guardian, Evening Standard, New Statesman, Cosmopolitan and SheerLuxe **

From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays — funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient — which seek answers to Burning Questions such as:

Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?
How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?
How can we live on our planet?
Is it true? And is it fair?
What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?

In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at our world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better questioner of the many and varied mysteries of our human universe.

‘She’s taken our times and made us wise to them’ Ali Smith

‘A writer of virtuoso diversity, with an imagination that responds as keenly to scientific concerns as it does to the literary heritage in which she is steeped’ Sunday Times

‘Brilliant and funny’ Joan Didion

‘All over the reading world, the history books are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood’s name is written at the top of it’ Anne Enright, Guardian

‘The outstanding novelist of our age’ Sunday Times

‘Lights a fire from the fears of our age … Miraculously balances humor, outrage, and beauty’ New York Times Book Review