Spanning nearly 20 years of writing, from 2004 onwards, Burning Questions is Margaret Atwood’s third book of essays and miscellaneous writing, all of which, she notes in the introduction, have been “tightly connected to their own time and place”. Why the title? “Possibly because the questions we’ve been faced with so far in the 21st century are more than urgent. Every age thinks that about its own crises, of course, but surely this era feels different. First, the planet. Is the world itself truly burning up? Is it we who’ve been setting fire to it? Can we put those fires out?”
Atwood is joined by a cast of narrators including the actor Ciarán Hinds, who reads Frozen in Time, Atwood’s introduction to the eponymous book by Owen Beattie and John Geiger about the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845. The Power author Naomi Alderman narrates How to Change the World?, which ponders the power of humans to determine the future of the planet. Meanwhile, the actor Ann Dowd reads Reflections on The Handmaid’s Tale, about the genesis of Atwood’s most famous novel, recalling how it was “dissed” by some reviewers, including the writer Mary McCarthy. Atwood took it in her stride – mostly. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, though it also sometimes makes you peevish.”
Elsewhere, there are tributes to fellow writers including Ursula K Le Guin, Alice Munro, Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir, and meditations on Donald Trump, tarot, Shakespeare, censorship, zombies and Laurie Anderson’s Big Science album. Reflecting on the latter, as read by Yvonne Boyer, Atwood urges us to “Have a listen. Confront the urgent questions. Feel the chill.”
• Burning Questions is available via Penguin Audio, 19hr 1min
Further listening
The Last Kingdom
Bernard Cornwell, HarperCollins, 13hr 28min
Jonathan Keeble reads the first of the Last Kingdom series about an epic power struggle between rival English kings, seen through the eyes of an orphan named Uhtred.
The State of Us
Jon Snow, Penguin Audio, 6hr 39min
The former Channel 4 News presenter looks back on his career in journalism while taking the political temperature of the nation.
