The Year of the Flood is a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, released on September 22, 2009 in Canada and the United States, and on September 7, 2009, in the United Kingdom. The novel was mentioned in numerous newspaper review articles looking forward to notable fiction of 2009.

The book focuses on a group called 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 and reveals the identity of the three real human figures who appear at the end of the earlier book and sets the scene for the final book of the trilogy, MaddAddam. Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC OOnt FRSC (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. In 2001 she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community. Among innumerable contributions to Canadian literature, she was a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Atwood is also the inventor, and developer, of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents. She is the Co-Founder and a Director of Syngrafii Inc. (formerly Unotchit Inc.), a company that she started in 2004 to develop, produce and distribute the LongPen technology.She holds various patents related to the LongPen technologies.