This chapter introduces the geographic area covered by the book. It reviews the changes that have taken place since the previous edition in 2007, in terms of the people who live there, their distribution, and the languages they use, showing that Britain and Ireland are becoming increasingly multiethnic and are homes to a rich array of languages and dialects. It also provides an overview of the rest of the book.

This chapter, paired with Chapter 2, suggests a close connection between politics at all levels in Atwood’s thinking, contrasting Somacarrera’s discussion of personal power politics with Rao’s analysis of power politics at the national level. It traces the development of themes of home and exile across selected texts: Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. The argument focuses on concepts of home and estrangement, showing how discourses of home are an extension of discourses of nation and national belonging, and how across Atwood’s later novels discourses of home have shifted into discourses of insecurity and alienation. Here storytelling is of paramount importance, providing patterns of meaning and a form of therapy as it becomes a poetics of survival in a postapocalyptic world where any idea of habitation is fragile and home is no longer a place of safety.