Margaret Atwood is of course the well-known Canadian author of, among others, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and The Blind Assassin (2000).

She wrote this book in 2008 when the world was battling the subprime crisis which threatened to collapse the world's economy as we knew it then.

Since then, the world had to face multiple crises, the latest being Covid and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so we may be pardoned if we have forgotten the details.

But the author immediately warns us "the book is not about debt management, or sleep debt, or the national debt, or about managing your monthly budget, or about how debt is actually a good thing because you can borrow money and then make it grow, or about shopaholics and how to figure out you are one: bookstores and the Internet abound in such materials."

She goes back to the history of her own family and of her own upbringing in the days of the Great Depression. Fortunately, she unearthed the account book her mother kept and how through careful management they kept free of debt, sometimes at the cost of sacrificing what they would have liked to purchase but couldn't afford.

After a detour around religion, or rather the religions of the world and what they have to say about debt and sin, Atwood comes to the themes nearer her heart - literature.

She focuses first on Charles Dickens' The Christmas Carol and the thoroughly unpleasant character, at first, of Scrooge. Then comes Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, followed by Goethe's version, and Washington Irving and his creepy tales.

Then come the all-time favourites - Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Dickens' Little Dorritt, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Edith Wharton and The House of Mirth, George Eliot and The Mill on the Floss, Dickens, again, in David Copperfield, Machiavelli and The Prince, and much more.

Debt brings about thoughts of revenge, so Shakespeare and The Merchant of Venice, also Hamlet, Othello...

And all this in a chatty, discursive manner.

At the end, the author tries her hand at imagining The Christmas Carol in today's world.