Oryx And Crake: Margaret Atwood (The Maddaddam Trilogy) - Softcover

Atwood, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349004064 ISBN 13: 9780349004068

Publisher: Virago, 2013

Synopsis

By the author of THE HANDMAID'S TALE and ALIAS GRACE

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Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, now calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility.

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Praise for Oryx and Crake:

'In Jimmy, Atwood has created a great character: a tragic-comic artist of the future, part buffoon, part Orpheus. An adman who's a sad man; a jealous lover who's in perpetual mourning; a fantasist who can only remember the past' -INDEPENDENT

'Gripping and remarkably imagined' -LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

About this title

Review:

"In the beginning, there was chaos..." Margaret Atwood's chilling new novel Oryx and Crake moves beyond the futuristic fantasy of her 1985 bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale to an even more dystopian world, a world where language--and with it anything beyond the merest semblance of humanity--has almost entirely vanished.

Snowman may be the last man on earth, the only survivor of an unnamed apocalypse. Once he was Jimmy, a member of a scientific elite; now he lives in bitter isolation and loneliness, his only pleasure the watching of old films on DVD. His mind moves backwards and forwards through time, from an agonising trawl through memory to relive the events that led up to sudden catastrophe (most significantly the disappearance of his mother and the arrival of his mysterious childhood companions Oryx and Crake, symbols of the fractured society in which Snowman now finds himself, to the horrifying present of genetic engineering run amok. His only witnesses, eager to lap up his testimony, are "Crakers", laboratory creatures of varying strengths and abilities, who can offer little comfort. Gradually the reasons behind the disaster begin to unfold as Snowman undertakes a perilous journey to the remains of the bubble-dome complex where the sinister Paradice Project collapsed and near-global devastation began.

This, Atwood’s 11th novel, confirms her as one of our most contemporary novelists. Darkly humorous and icily prescient, Oryx and Crake shows a writer deeply concerned with the stark moral issues facing the human race, and accords a glimpse of a future that lies all too uneasily within reach. --Catherine Taylor

Review:

The writing is spare. The structure is tight. The observation of the human condition is both profound and impish. Character is crucial. The issues are huge and we feel the weight of them. Finally, it leaves the reader on a cliff-edge the like of which I have never encountered elsewhere. It was nominated for the Man Booker. I think it should have won (Anita Mason Guardian)

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0349004064
• ISBN 13: 9780349004068
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448