Oryx And Crake
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3.9 • 7 Ratings
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
BY THE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF THE HANDMAID'S TALE
FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
THE FIRST VOLUME IN ATWOOD'S DARKLY WITTY MADDADDAM TRILOGY
'Shocking and darkly humorous . . . A book to galvanise' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Towering and intrepid . . . Atwood does Orwell one better' NEW YORKER
'Both profound and impish . . . Atwood is one of the most impressively ambitious writers of our time' GUARDIAN
'Oryx and Crake is Atwood at her best - dark, dry, scabrously witty, yet moving and studded with flashes of pure poetry' INDEPEDENT
Jimmy is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human. He lives in a tree, dresses himself in old bedsheets, and now calls himself Snowman. He mourns the loss of his best friend, Crake. And the voice of Oryx, the woman they both loved, teasingly haunts him.
Before, Snowman had led a privileged life. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Was he himself in any way at fault? Why has he now been left alone with his bizarre memories? And why are the green-eyed, more-than-perfect Children of Crake seemingly his responsibility?
Searching for answers, Snowman embarks on a journey through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride - a near future that is outlandish yet all too familiar.
'Gripping and remarkably imagined . . . it joins The Handmaid's Tale in the distinguished company of novels [like] The Time Machine, Brave New World and 1984' THE TIMES
'A powerful vision' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
'Atwood's dry wit makes dystopia fun' PEOPLE
'Gripping and remarkably imagined' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
'A roll of dry, black, parodic laughter' THE ECONOMIST
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.
