Fledgling
Octavia E. Butler's extraordinary final novel
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'The Octavia Butler novel for our times' THE ATLANTIC
'My book of the year . . . completely devours the genre which gave rise to it' JUNOT DÍAZ
The final ground-breaking novel from renowned, bestselling author Octavia E. Butler.
A young girl wakes up in the woods, gravely injured and alone, with no memory of what happened or who she is.
As Shori heals, she realises that she isn't like the people around her, which leads to a shocking discovery. She is a fifty-three-year-old vampire, and in terrible danger.
To save herself, Shori must learn anew everything about the power and desires that she holds, the life that was stolen from her - and those who want her dead.
PRAISE FOR OCTAVIA E. BUTLER, THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
'In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time... for sheer peculiar prescience, Butler's novel may be unmatched' NEW YORKER
'Octavia Butler was playing out our very real possibilities as humans. I think she can help each of us to do the same' GLORIA STEINEM
'Butler's prose, always pared back to the bone, delineates the painful paradoxes of metamorphosis with compelling precision' GUARDIAN
'One of the most significant literary artists of the twentieth century' JUNOT DIAZ
'Octavia Butler was a visionary' VIOLA DAVIS
'Her evocative, often troubling, novels explore far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human' NEW YORK TIMES
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The much-lauded Butler creates vampires in her 12th novel (her first in seven years) that have about as much to do with Bram Stoker's Dracula as HBO's Deadwood does with High Noon. They need human blood to survive, but they don't kill unless they have to, and (given several hundred years) they'll eventually die peacefully of old age. They are Ina, and they've coexisted with humans for millennia, imparting robust health and narcotic bliss with every bite to their devoted human blood donors, aka "symbionts." Shori is a 53-year-old Ina (a juvenile) who wakes up in a cave, amnesiac and seriously wounded. As is later revealed, her family and their symbionts were murdered because they genetically engineered a generation of part-Ina, part-human children. Shori was their most successful experiment: she can stay conscious during daylight hours, and her black skin helps protect her from the sun. The lone survivor, Shori must rely on a few friendly (and tasty) people to help her warn other Ina families and rediscover herself. Butler, keeping tension high, reveals the mysteries of the Ina universe bit by tantalizing bit. Just as the Ina's collective honor and dignity starts to get a little dull, a gang of bigoted, black sheep Ina rolls into town for a species-wide confab-cum-smackdown. In the feisty Shori, Butler has created a new vampire paradigm one that's more prone to sci-fi social commentary than gothic romance and given a tired genre a much-needed shot in the arm.
