Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblot, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm very happy and honored to have as my guest, Margaret Atwood, whose new novel, The Year of the Flood, has recently been published by Doubleday under the Nantelese imprint.

And it's doubly fascinating in that it is a book that coincides with her previous novel, Orix and Craig,

although each of them can be read individually.

And so those of us who love to gain fuller access to a world,

no more about how this world works came to be.

In the last book, we were visiting more with the dominant culture,

and now we are seeing the lives of people who've been affected by the biotechnology of the new world.

Margaret, what are other examples of simultaneous novels?

It's fascinating.

I'm not sure that there are any, but my analogy is in the Victorian novel, you would come across a chapter that would begin Meanwhile.

And you would know that when you were reading Meanwhile, that what was in that chapter was happening at the same time as the chapter you had just read, but in a different place and to different people.

But you also knew that sooner or later those two groups of people, Oliver Twist and his wicked half-brother,

were going to come together in some way.

So in this book, here we are.

What do you call this world? Do you have a name for it?

No, because it is our world. It's just further down the road. So it's not on another planet.

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