Stephenie Harrison

All good things must come to an end, and that time has finally come for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy about a small group of humans who have outlasted a devastating super plague and now battle to survive in this hostile new world.

MaddAddam picks up immediately where The Year of the Flood dramatically ended, throwing readers into the deep end along with Toby, who featured prominently in the previous novel and upon whom the narrative now rests. The world Toby and her compatriots navigate is not unlike our 21st century one, but with all its vices taken to the extreme; full of pun-laced jargon and deadly hybrids, danger lurks around every corner and the mantra “kill or be killed” rules the day. At this point in the series, Atwood clearly assumes that readers of MaddAddam have strapped in for the two previous rides—this is a novel where everyone, even the reader, is expected to pull her own weight or risk being left for dead.

As in previous novels, the story blends past and present: Toby carries the present-day story as the remaining members of the pacifist faction God’s Gardeners evade a band of ruthless killers and search for their lost leader, Adam One, while forming some unlikely alliances along the way. The bulk of the narrative’s meat, however, lies with the mysterious Zeb, who has danced about the periphery of the previous novels and now finally opens up about his past and shares the origin story of the Gardeners and its activist counterpoint, MaddAddam, as well as the deadly plague that clobbered humanity. There is enough backstory here to allow new readers to fill in the blanks, but clearly this novel will be most rewarding for readers who are already invested in these characters’ plight and are looking for the final pieces of the puzzle regarding why this world so dramatically crumbled and what the future holds.

Within the pages of speculative fiction, the rarest thing to find is a happy ending, and MaddAddam is one of the finest examples of the genre, which doesn’t bode well for its protagonists. But while much must be sacrificed and not every character makes it safely to the end, Atwood is not so ruthless as to extinguish all glimmers of hope for the future. MaddAddam is as much a beginning as it is an ending. Told with Atwood’s characteristic incisive wit and insight, it is a fitting and wholly satisfying conclusion to what has proven to be a truly epic series.

It’s clear that 1985 hasn’t been Greta Wells’ year. Reeling from the death of her twin brother and the shock of her longtime partner walking out on her, Greta feels as if the very foundation of her life is crumbling and threatening to take her with it. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so in a last-ditch attempt at happiness, Greta turns to electroshock therapy, hoping it will help dispel the quagmire of depression and despair she finds herself sinking into. The treatment is not without consequence, however: With each electrifying session, Greta finds herself transported through time, sliding seamlessly into lives in different decades that, with but the slightest shuffling of fate’s deck of cards, could have been her own.

Which life will Greer's time-traveler heroine choose?

As Greta bounces from her 1918 persona of oppressed housewife with a secret lover, to a doting mother and picture-perfect wife in 1941 and back to 1985 once more, she revels in the return of loved ones she feared were forever out of reach, while also grappling with the struggles and losses that seem to reverberate throughout each lifetime. The harsh boundaries between the lives begin to soften as the burdens that each Greta carries can no longer be ignored and the consequences of their actions become increasingly difficult to compartmentalize. With the end of her treatment drawing near, Greta faces a race to set everything right and must prepare herself to choose the one life in which happily ever after has the potential to exist right now.

In The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, Andrew Sean Greer masterfully harnesses the dizzying powers of his imagination to explore the intoxicating question of “what if?” in a story that proves utterly enchanting. Greer writes with a thoughtfulness and elegance that allows the multiple storylines to coalesce easily into something that is both larger than life and the very essence of it. Though the time-travel may initially throw some readers for a loop, the quandaries that Greta faces are sufficiently universal and convincing—and Greer’s storytelling so skillful—that within the pages of fiction, the impossible has never seemed so attainable, or so real.

Coming from a long line of apiarists, one might think that honey rather than blood flows through Albert Honig’s veins. Few outside his family can understand his fascination with bees and the delicate dynamics of the hives that he gently cultivates, and Albert’s obsession with the insects gradually estranges him from most of the world. That is, until he meets Claire, the Honigs’ spirited and enigmatic neighbor, who comes down with a case of bee fever to rival Albert’s own. United by their common passion, the two forge a friendship that weathers the passage of decades and the various storms life blows their way, until one of their own making rips the two asunder. Albert has never truly accepted their estrangement, but it is the finality of Claire’s death—murdered in a robbery gone awry—that finally forces him to face the past and its terrible truths, the worst of which just might be the realization that he may not have really known Claire at all.

Like Albert himself, Peggy Hesketh’s debut novel, Telling the Bees, feels like something from another time. Though Hesketh does tackle some difficult material, she does so with a graceful sensibility, never veering into the sordid or macabre. Elegiac in its tone, Telling the Bees is a quiet, meditative novel, dressed up as a murder mystery, but more geared towards examining the intricacies of the human condition and the power of secrets when voiced than in identifying who killed Claire. As Albert slowly sifts through his fragile memories of the past, patient readers will be rewarded with a rich story that softly stings and is utterly unforgettable.