In the title story from her acclaimed collection Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood takes us to the farm.
At first, for Nell and Tig, livestock would mean deadstock. Newly-arrived city slickers shouldn't have animals, they think, corroborated by the real farmers down the road. But Tig's kids from his first marriage are at the farm on weekends, and it's not a bad education for children to learn where their food comes from. First come the chickens, then the ducks, and before Nell knows it the cows have arrived too. Soon Nell finds herself becoming a different type of woman than she ever thought she might be.
The author of such towering novels as The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood creates worlds just as vividly in her short fiction. The New York Times Book Review notes that "the tremendous imaginative power of [Atwood's] fiction allows us to believe that anything is possible"—this applies as much to the world of the Crakers as it does to the strange life of a family in the countryside. By turns funny, moving, incisive, earthy, shocking, "Moral Disorder" displays Atwood's celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage.