It is hard to regret the destruction of the world described, yet I felt sad that the reboot could not offer more hope for the future. The whole book has an allegorical feel running alongside the tension and action. These are biblical in style, the writing of them serving as a spiritual text more than a history. Key plot details are first unveiled as simplified stories told each evening to the Crakers. This final part is as compelling and skillfully written as the previous two. The MaddAddam trilogy tells of a dystopian future that makes for powerful reading because it is so perceptive, detailed and believable. It suggested that the world is condemned to repeat its mistakes from whatever new start, perhaps that is the point which the author wishes to make.

I found this glimpse the most depressing aspect of the book as it looked rather too familiar. As well as more detailed background we are given a glimpse of how the new world order will develop once the chaos has settled. The peaceful replacements that he created, the Crakers, play a prominent role in this instalment as do several of the other creatures bioengineered by the gene splicing scientists before the waterless flood. The survivors from these groups are now living as a small community, trying to eke out an existence following the chaos that Crake unleashed in his attempt to rid the world of the evils of humanity.

In telling his story we get the final links in the plot strands that join characters we have been introduced to in the previous books, the MaddAddamites and God’s Gardeners. MaddAddam focuses on the street-wise Zeb. All three books tell stories that run in parallel, although each takes the overlapping characters a little further along in time. MaddAddam, by Margaret Atwood, is the final book in a trilogy which started with Oryx and Crake in 2003 and continued with The Year of the Flood in 2009.

The maddaddam trilogy order