The Year of the Flood is a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, the second book of her dystopian trilogy, released on September 22, 2009 in Canada and the United States, and on September 7, 2009, in the United Kingdom.^[1] The novel was mentioned in numerous newspaper review articles looking forward to notable fiction of 2009.^[2][3]

The book focuses on a religious sect called the God's Gardeners, a small community of survivors of the same biological catastrophe depicted in Atwood's earlier novel Oryx and Crake. The earlier novel contained several brief references to the group.

It answers some of the questions of Oryx and Crake, develops and further elaborates upon several of the characters in the first book, and reveals the identity of the three human figures who appear at the end of the earlier book. The final book of the trilogy is MaddAddam.^[4]