Pulitzer Prize–winning author Carol Shields once stated “that language that carries weight in our culture is very often fuelled by a search for home, our rather piteous human groping toward that metaphorical place where we can be most truly ourselves.” Margaret Atwood taps into this fundamental desire for belonging and refuge in her latest novel, The Heart Goes Last. This work of speculative fiction offers both literal and figurative notions of what constitutes the ideal home in a world plagued by economic ruin, uncertainty and an appetite for superficial pleasures.
Atwood is known for her skilful imagining of utopian/dystopian societies, in books such as her recent MaddAddam trilogy and the classic The Handmaid’s Tale, which prompt readers to reflect on how their own worlds may be improved. The imagined society that Atwood creates in The Heart Goes Last
Shelley Boyd teaches Canadian literature in the English department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia. She is the author of Garden Plots: Canadian Women Writers and Their Literary Gardens (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).
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