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Oryx and Crake cover art

Oryx and Crake

Written by: Margaret Atwood
Narrated by: Campbell Scott
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Publisher's Summary

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.

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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What listeners say about Oryx and Crake

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

In case you'd forgotten that Atwood is a hurricane

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)

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Loved it!

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

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  • Overall
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Endlessly Relevant

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.

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  • Overall
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    5 out of 5 stars

This book is bonkers in a good way

Great narration

Crazy good story but is not for the squeamish.

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

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    3 out of 5 stars

Depressing, but good...

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.

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listen to this book.

the performance is fantastic; there is variance in characters that fits their descriptions and it hits exactly the right emotional note without being overdone at all. the book itself, of course, is a classic full of incredibly visual descriptions , smilies, metaphors, and an incredibly easy to listen to, conversational style.

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  • Overall
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Awesome

I can't wait until I listen to the next book.
I never tore of Margret Atwood.

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  • me
  • 2020-03-17

An interesting read

I tried to read this myself but found it difficult to stay focused when reading time was sporadic. Listening made it much easier and engrossing because I could listen while tending to life demands.

Interesting concept that takes the full book to envision. Timely read but not for.those given to anxiety or paranoia. :)

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I personally really enjoyed this novel.

The main reason is all the world-building, the biotechnologies of the 2000s were explained really well and slightly expanded on for intrigue. I could definitely see people who are not tech or bio savvy having a hard time believing a world like this may truly be the future of humanity. They may even refer to it as exaggerated or science fiction... however, those technologies are not really that many decades away from our current times.

I enjoyed the constant tension and admiration that jimmy and Glenn had for one another, both for their own reasons.

I'm still beside myself with how amazing the plot twist is as well as the shocking Homicide-Amicicide.

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One of the Best Apocalyptic Novels

I loved the voice actor, and the phenomenal way that he wove life into Mrs. Atwood's amazing stories.

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