Margaret Atwood

There’s no shortage of big names unveiling new books at this year’s festival—William Boyd, Richard Dawkins and Douglas Coupland, to name but a few—but the ostentatious ceremony accompanying the launch of The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood’s new novel, should take the prize for sheer drama.

In a similar dystopian vein to 2003’s Oryx and Crake, Atwood's latest is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth populated by just a few straggling humans and lots of mutants. The survivors start a new religion inspired by the hymns of the God’s Gardeners, an apocalyptic sect whose credo is one of the novel’s themes.

Some of these hymns have been put to music by composer Orville Stoeber—words by Atwood, of course—and will be performed at what promises to be an unforgettable event in the appropriately awe-inspiring surroundings of St. John’s Church on Princes Street.