Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last (2015) is a dystopian novel about a desperate couple who sign away their freedom in exchange for the safety and comfort offered by an experimental walled community.
When a financial crash devastates the Rust Belt region of the United States, Stan and Charmaine lose their jobs and home. While living out of a car, Charmaine learns about the Consilience/Positron Project, which offers guaranteed employment and a house. But there's a catch: Premised on the idea that prison labor can sustain a community, the project requires participants to spend half their time laboring in a prison and half their time working a regular job in the town of Consilience, alternating on a month-on, month-off schedule. Soon after joining, Charmaine takes a job euthanizing unruly prisoners who won't comply with the project, and it becomes clear that the project has totalitarian aims. She also begins an affair with the man who shares their house while they are working in the prison. Stan later learns that the affair was orchestrated by Jocelyn, a cofounder of Positron who is using Stan and Charmaine as pawns in an elaborate plot to bring down her business partner, Ed. Through faking Stan's death, Jocelyn gets Stan to smuggle evidence out of the walled community, and a journalist exposes the fact that Ed has been selling organs harvested from euthanized criminals and abducting women to erase their memories and turn them into sex slaves for paying customers. The novel ends with Jocelyn taking over the corporation while Charmaine and Stan renew their wedding vows, with Charmaine living under the false impression that she has undergone a brain adjustment to make her hopelessly devoted to Stan.
Published in 2015, The Heart Goes Last is a darkly comic novel that explores themes of exploitation, human rights, greed, and manipulation. With the totalitarian Consilience/Positron project, Atwood satirizes the American prison-industrial complex, which critics have compared to modern-day slavery.
