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Payback by Margaret Atwood

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William Leith

12 June 2009

This book was a series of lectures by the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood. Her subject: debt. What is debt? It's something that needs to be redeemed. Debt is, in a way, sin. Atwood points out that Christ, who is known as the Redeemer, essentially paid off Adam's original debt. She also gives us a welter of facts and stories about pawnshops, Father Christmas, and debt in literary history, with a lovely comparison between Scrooge, the reformed moneylender, and Dr Faustus, the doomed debtor.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

In this wide-ranging history of debt Margaret Atwood investigates its many meanings through the ages, from ancient times to the current global financial meltdown. Many of us wonder: how could we have let such a collapse happen? How old or inevitable is this human pattern of debt? Imaginative, topical and insightful, Payback urges us to reconsider our ideas of ownership and debt - before it is too late.

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