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Oryx and Crake
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Synopsis
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
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. '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
Comparison: J G Ballard, Glen David Gold, Susanna Clarke
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Reviews
Atwood at her best - dark, dry, scabrously witty, yet moving and studded with flashes of pure poetry. Her gloriously inventive brave new world is all the more chilling because of the mirror it holds up to our own Lisa Appignanesi, The Independent Magazine Atwood herself is one of our finest linguistic engineers. Her carefully calibrated sentences are formulated to hook and paralyse the reader Saturday Telegraph Observer 'enlivening, deadpan wit and the mix of empathy and insight she always brings to her characters... Saturated in science, the novel is simulatneously alive with literary resonances... This superlatively gripping and remarkably imagined book joins The
In this book, Atwood returns to the territory she explored so effectively in The Handmaid's Tale, only this time the threat is much greater. In a future not that far distant from our own, the consequences of man's intervention in the natural world have become all too apparent. The precise nature of recent events remains unclear for much of the book but from early on it is apparent that some kind of biotechnological disaster has occurred, leaving the narrator, Snowman, who in another world was known as Jimmy, as possibly the last human on earth. But Snowman is not alone, sharing with the mysterious green-eyed Children of Crake the land on which the tree that is now his home stands. The book alternates Snowman's bleak present-day existence, foraging for food and clad only in a sheet, with scenes from his past, showing how the dream of a brave new world went horribly wrong. It's also a love story: of Snowman's yearning for his long-vanished mother; for Oryx, a woman he first saw on a child porn internet channel, and for his brilliant but dangerous best friend, Crake. Growing up in a compound provided by his father's employers and designed to keep out the undesirables who live in the surrounding 'pleeblands', Jimmy finds life cold and confusing but his exhibitionism and humour earn him a few casual friends and when Crake joins his school he feels a new sense of belonging, although it is a relationship that is to have deadly consequences. Atwood is at her brilliant best when conjuring up these all-too-believable scenarios in worlds apparently only one small step away from our own. She clearly relishes the type of inventiveness required here, conjuring up a world of strange creatures and products, including the once useful and occasionally cute pigoons and rakunks, the BlyssPluss pill and the potentially sinister computer game Extinctathon. It makes uncomfortable but compelling reading. (Kirkus UK)
About the Author
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Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
She is the author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman, The Handmaid's Tale, The Robber Bride and Alias Grace. Her novel, The Blind Assassin, won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.
Author photo © George Whiteside
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Book Info
Format
Paperback
448 pages
Author
Margaret Atwood
More books by Margaret Atwood
Publisher
Virago Press Ltd an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group
Publication
date
25th March 2004
ISBN
9781844080281
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