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Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake

Written by Margaret Atwood

Shortlisted
The Man Booker Prize 2003
Published by Bloomsbury

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Margaret Atwood projects us into a less-than-brave new world, an outlandish yet wholly believable space populated by a cast of memorable characters

The narrator is Snowman. As the story begins, he’s sleeping in a tree, wearing a dirty old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. Earlier, his life was one of comparative privilege, living with all the other smart, rich people in the gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside in the chaotic ‘pleeblands’.) How did everything fall apart so quickly? Was he himself in any way responsible? 

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is the world-renowned author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays
More about Margaret Atwood

Other nominated books by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments
Prize winner
Margaret Atwood’s spellbinding sequel to The Handmaid's Tale was inspired by readers’ responses to the first book and ‘the world we’ve been living in’
The Blind Assassin
Prize winner
Margaret Atwood’s 2000 Booker winner is a multilayered drama that weaves its narrative threads across past and present, fiction and reality
Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood’s captivating historical fiction about the notorious 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery
Cat's Eye
In Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed novel, an artist returning to her home city is consumed by images of the lavish cruelties she endured there as a child
The Handmaid's Tale
In Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopian classic, nothing happens ‘that hasn’t already happened at some time or another’