Luckily, learning the lexicon is worth the effort because the world that Atwood has created is fascinating and the narrative — which jumps back and forth between the intensity of the survivors' makeshift community and scenes of the vast, decaying society that existed before the plague — is unpredictable and gripping. But the most engaging part of the novel is the way that Atwood explores the idea of storytelling itself.

"There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told," she reflects. We watch as Toby lies in Zeb's arms late at night, listening to the complicated and violent episodes that have made up her lover's life and then, at the start of each chapter, we see how she simplifies the tangle of truth into stories that the curious Crackers accept as the foundations of their evolving folklore.

We are separated by so many millennia from the poets and fireside storytellers who first created versions of the mythologies and folktales that we are steeped in, that it is difficult to imagine what real events, if any, might have inspired their origins. So it is a thrill to watch that process unfurl before our eyes — to see how a botched kidnapping that led to Zeb nearly starving to death in the mountains becomes the trickster-like tale of "How Zeb Ate a Bear". Or how the Crackers overhearing the exclamation "Oh fuck" necessitates Toby inventing an invisible winged deity of that name, who flies to our side in times of need. Conjuring up fanciful or plausible visions of the apocalypse might be attention-grabbing, but until it happens it's just another story that we tell ourselves to try and make sense of the world — to understand where we came from and where we might be going.