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Oryx and Crake

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Oryx and Crake

Written by: Margaret Atwood
Narrated by: Campbell Scott
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The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.

©2002 O.W. Toad, Ltd. (P)2003 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc. Dystopian Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Women's Voices Emotionally Gripping
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What the critics say

"Absorbing...expertly rendered...Virtuosic storytelling [is] on display." (The New York Times)
"Chesterton once wrote of the 'thousand romances that lie secreted in the Origin of the Species.' Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them all, and one of the most brilliant." (Publishers Weekly)

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Most Relevant
of speculative fiction, here is a tale full of strange and sickeningly familiar futures, deeply flawed technocratic geniuses, genetic contortionism, and a capitalist world rocketing towards the post-post-apocalyse.
Terrifying. Beautiful. Dryly hilarious. Tragic.
Heck, it's Atwood at her finest, making us laugh and whimper at the future while holding a bitter mirror to the present.

Also, the narrator is as perfectly dry as Atwood herself, and suits the story well. (Although I cannot understand why he keeps pronouncing "feral" as "fearal". I twitched every time)

In case you'd forgotten that Atwood is a hurricane

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Slow Start but really ended up enjoying this book cant wait to read the next in the series.

Loved it!

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Margaret has the courage to write down the spindles of thought most only think and then actively ignore. A prophetic master of telling the old stories in probable new ways.

Endlessly Relevant

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Great narration

Crazy good story but is not for the squeamish.

Anyone with a biology background will enjoy the clever references throughout the book.

This book is bonkers in a good way

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Very well written, as you'd expect, and the narrator is excellent. Not exactly my cup of post-apocalyptic tea, but definitely a solid story.

Depressing, but good...

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