Description:The gated community of Consilience isn’t your average American town, but
in a near future imagined by bestselling author Margaret Atwood (“The
Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Year of the Flood”) it may be as close as anyone
can hope to get.
Husband and wife Stan and Charmaine are among
thousands who have signed up for a new social order because the old one
is all but broken. Outside the walls of Consilience, half the country is
out of work, gangs of the drug-addicted and disaffected menace the
streets, warlords disrupt the food supply, and overcrowded correctional
facilities churn out offenders to make room for more.
The
Consilience prison, Positron, is something else altogether. The very
heart of the community and its economic engine, it’s a bold experiment
in voluntary incarceration. In exchange for a house, food, and what the
online brochure hails as “A Meaningful Life,” residents agree to spend
one month as inmates, the next as civilians, working as guards or
whatever’s required.
Stan and Charmaine have no complaints—until
the day Stan discovers an erotic note under the fridge of the house he
and Charmaine must share with another couple while they’re back inside
Positron. It’s a missive of erotic longing, pressed with a vivid