Promotional Information

Published to coincide with Margaret Atwood's 70th birthday, as part of a series of seven special editions of Margaret Atwood's best work to date: Surfacing, The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake Each book in this special edition series (1,500 copies per title) will be beautifully produced with lavishly illustrated covers printed on cloth and silver endpapers Oryx and Crake has sold over 130,000 copies through BookScan and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

About the Author

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. In addition to the classic The Handmaid's Tale, her novels include Cat's Eye, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, and Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. Her latest novel, The Year of the Flood, is published by Bloomsbury in September 2009. She was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 2008. Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto, Canada.

Reviews

'Oryx and Crake is 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. Citizens, be warned.' Independent 'Oryx and Crake can hold its own against any of the 20th century's most potent dystopias - Brave New World, 1984, The Space Merchants - with regard to both dramatic impact and fertility of invention ... Oryx and Crake showcases a nightmare version of the present era of globalization on a globe coming apart at its ecological seams ... It is a scathing (because bang-on) portrait of the way we live now ... Majestic' Washington Post 'Contemporary novelists rarely write about science or technology. Margaret Atwood tackles both - and more - in one of the year's most surprising novels' Economist 'Oryx and Crake is Atwood at her playful, allegorical best' Globe and Mail

Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant. (May 6) Forecast: Readers who know Atwood primarily as the author of The Handmaid's Tale will be thrilled by this return to the future; those who follow her work more closely will be even more impressed. This is a potential dystopian classic and should sell accordingly. Author tour. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.