Burning Questions is a canny title for Margaret Atwood’s new book of essays and occasional pieces. It reflects both the urgency of the issues dear to her...and their combustibility, the risk that in writing about them she might get burned.

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to collect their PEN International speeches between hard covers.

One of the most notable aspects of this collection is how engaged Atwood, now 82, has remained with the pressing issues of the day.

She narrates her work, like a dressmaker with pins in her mouth chatting while she does a fitting. Sartor resarta.

As the world knows, Margaret Atwood’s cerebral imagination produces brilliantly realised writing in a manner never less than authoritative. No less authoritative is this volume, which shows her turn over a range of subjects like a thoughtful archaeologist thumbing a piece of ground, seeking clarity about virtually everything, from freedom to culture wars, to bird-watching, autocracy and feminism.

Individual pieces cover a broad range of topics and forms, and with many, Atwood presents a mix of digression into autobiographical vignettes (counting bugs in the Canadian woods with her father, semi-disastrous forays into fashion, discovering Tarot, leaky roofs) with cultural critique (from Simone de Beauvoir and second wave feminism to the treatment of female students at Harvard), and then looping back to the stated topic again. A common refrain in these highly discursive pieces is, 'but I digress,' which, with any writer of lesser skill, would be annoying. But it’s not, she’s not. Because many of these pieces were written as lectures or speeches for various groups (students, lawyers, neurologists, nurses), we can hear Atwood’s voice leap off the page. Others written as book reviews and introductions for everyone from Bradbury to her own husband’s posthumous reissues, are just as vibrant because, of course, Atwood’s writing voice is both accessible and compelling: she invites you in, and you want to keep reading..

The collection is less selective than exhaustive. Despite the urgency evoked by its title, one gains few fresh revelations from these pieces.

Impressive.