Payback

Available in a new edition and with an introduction by Margaret Atwood, Payback delivers a surprising look at the topic of "debt" -- a subject that continues to be timely.

Legendary novelist, poet, and essayist Margaret Atwood delivers a surprising look at the topic of "debt" -- a subject that continues to be timely during this current period of economic upheaval. In her intelligent and imaginative approach to the subject, Atwood proposes that "debt" is like air -- something we take for granted and never think about until things go wrong.

This is not a book about practical debt management or high finance, although it does touch upon those subjects. Rather, it goes far deeper into an investigation of debt as a very old, very central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies. By looking at how debt has informed our thinking from preliterate times to the present day, through the stories we tell to our concepts of "revenge" and "sin" to the way we structure our social relationships, Atwood shows that this idea of what we owe -- in other words, "debt" -- is possibly built into the human imagination as one of its most dynamic metaphors. In the final section, Atwood touches upon not only our current global financial situation, but also the concept of our "debt to nature" and how our ideas of ownership and debt must be changed if we are to find a new way to interact with our natural environment.

MARGARET ATWOOD is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Her most recent books include Hag-Seed, a novel revisitation of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and Angel Catbird -- featuring a cat-bird superhero -- a graphic novel with co-creator Johnnie Christmas. She is a two-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award, has won the Man Booker Award, and was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. Recently, her novel The Handmaid's Tale was adapted for television to international acclaim, and Alias Grace was made into a CBC miniseries by director and actor Sarah Polley. Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.