Grace Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of economic and social collapse. Living in their car, surviving on tips from Charmaine's job at a dive bar, they're increasingly vulnerable to roving gangs and in a rather desperate state.

"'Remember what your life used to be like?' says the man's voice . . . 'At the Positron Project in the town of Consilience, it can be like that again . . . Sign up now!'"


For Stan and Charmaine, a married couple struggling with problems after the world's brutal economic collapse - living in their car, lousy jobs, vandalism, debt - it's the answer. There's just one drawback: once inside you don't get out.


'Awfully good' Mail on Sunday

By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

Charmaine sees an advertisement for a project called Positron that promises you a job, a place to live, a bed to sleep in - imagine how appealing that would be if you were working in a dive bar and living in your car. She and her husband, Stan, apply at once.

The only catch is that once you're in there, you can't get out.

No one writes the lust and the loves, the wickedness and the weakness of the human heart like the splendid Margaret Atwood.

'Margaret Atwood [is] a living legend' New York Times Book Review

'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 thirty years ago with The Handmaid's Tale is still at her darkly comic best' Sunday Times