Fifteen stories whose common thread is memory, collected in the book «Old children lost in the woods», in which Margaret Atwood explores love and loss, arriving in bookstores on October 3rd for Ponte alle Grazie. The two-time winning writer of the Booker Prize, Several times nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, it crosses all narrative registers and gives life to unforgettable characters. In Nell and Tig we can guess Atwood herself and her husband Graeme Gibson, passed away in 2019. They are the “old children”, in a nostalgic and extraordinarily poetic reenactment of their walks in the Canadian forests.
Among the protagonists of the stories are a mother who perhaps has the powers of a witch, an interview with George Orwell conducted through a medium, a dystopian tale for those who love Atwood’s visionary novels, a war veteran who writes poetry in the midst of destruction, and in the end Nell and Tig again, but above all Tig, who has become a poignant absence.
A surprising reading, in which death appears in the forms of memory and absence, as a natural and inevitable part of our destiny but also as nostalgia for a time in which utopias seemed possibilities, while now it is impossible not to see “the immense wave of the unknown that is already bearing down on us” writes Atwood who lives in Toronto, Canada.
“She must have known, somehow, that he would be the first to set sail,” writes the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” cult novel that also became a successful TV series.