Available in a new edition and with an introduction by Margaret Atwood, Payback delivers a surprising look at the topic of “debt” — a subject that continues to be timely.

Legendary novelist, poet, and essayist Margaret Atwood delivers a surprising look at the topic of “debt” — a subject that continues to be timely during this current period of economic upheaval. In her intelligent and imaginative approach to the subject, Atwood proposes that “debt” is like air — something we take for granted and never think about until things go wrong.

This is not a book about practical debt management or high finance, although it does touch upon those subjects. Rather, it goes far deeper into an investigation of debt as a very old, very central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies. By looking at how debt has informed our thinking from preliterate times to the present day, through the stories we tell to our concepts of “revenge” and “sin” to the way we structure our social relationships, Atwood shows that this idea of what we owe — in other words, “debt” — is possibly built into the human imagination as one of its most dynamic metaphors. In the final section, Atwood touches upon not only our current global financial situation, but also the concept of our “debt to nature” and how our ideas of ownership and debt must be changed if we are to find a new way to interact with our natural environment.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. 

Margaret Atwood's profile page

• Short-listed, National Business Book Award
• Short-listed, OLA Evergreen Award (Forest of Reading)
• Commended, Globe and Mail Top 100 Best Books of the Year
• Runner-up, Axiom Business Book Awards - Business Ethics

An extraordinarily vibrant Massey Lecture on debt, how it plays a motor force in much literature, in our own lives, and in the machinations of the crowd we elect to govern us.

Maclean’s

A celebrated novelist, poet, and critic, Atwood has combined rigorous analysis, wide-ranging erudition, and a beguilingly playful imagination to produce the most probing and thought-stirring commentary on the financial crisis to date.

New York Review of Books

Witty, acutely argued, and almost freakishly prescient . . . as amusing as it is unsettling.

Chicago Tribune

Elegant and erudite . . . as one would expect from a novelist of Ms. Atwood’s calibre, the phrasing is polished and the metaphors striking.

Economist.com

A fascinating, freewheeling examination of ideas of debt, balance and revenge in history, society, and literature — Atwood has again struck upon our most current anxieties.

Times of London

"Ms. Atwood is a witty and astute writer of broad sympathy and wide-ranging curiosity, and the prose of the book, at once commonsensical and counterintuitive, bristles with insight and implication."

New York Times

[Payback is] a demonstration of Atwood’s ability to evoke in memorable detail our vanished cultural past, and to examine both past and present in the form of language. Writing in this mode, she’s never off her game.

National Post

In Payback, Atwood freely mixes autobiography, literary criticism, and anthropology in an examination of debt as a concept deeply rooted in human — and even, in some cases, animal — behaviour . . . Building an argument that abounds with literary examples . . . Atwood entertainingly and often wryly advances the familiar thesis that what goes around comes around.

Toronto Star

Payback is a delightfully engaging, smart, funny, clever, and terrifying analysis of the role debt plays in our culture, our consciousness, our economy, our ecology, and, if Atwood is right, our future.

Washington Post