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With the same stunning blend of prophecy and social satire she brought to her classic The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood gives us a keenly prescient novel about the future of humanity—and its present.

Humanity here equals Snowman, and in Snowman’s recollections Atwood re-creates a time much like our own, when a boy named Jimmy loved an elusive, damaged girl called Oryx and a sardonic genius called Crake. But now Snowman is alone, and as we learn why we also learn about a world that could become ours one day.

"A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, BRAVE NEW WORLD, and...WE. Atwood has surpassed herself."

Kirkus, 03/15/2003

"In much the same way that she tried to satirize the condition of women in THE HANDMAID'S TALE, so Ms. Atwood tries in this volume to call attention to the dangers of science and technology run amuck. As she did in that earlier book, she has attempted in these pages to extrapolate surreal happenings from current developments. Cloning, fetal-tissue and genetic research, bio-engineering, the obsession with youth and the merchandising of beauty and health: such phenomena form the platform from which the Frankensteinian horrors in ORYX AND CRAKE spring. Unfortunately Ms. Atwood's brave new world never feels remotely plausible: it is neither fully imagined as a place with its own intractable rules and realities, nor is it a convincing sendup of contemporary life. Instead the book feels laboriously manufactured: a lumbering mutant, part Michael Crichton novel (minus the suspense), part back-to-nature screed against a fake, plastic society in thrall to money and looks. Ms. Atwood's vaunted storytelling skills, so nimbly on display in her 2000 novel THE BLIND ASSASSIN, have pulled a disappearing act in these pages; in their place are paint-by-numbers plot points and lots of stage-managed scenes....By the time we've plowed through ORYX AND CRAKE, we can only wish that Ms. Atwood had inserted Jimmy-Snowman into a different novel...."

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, 05/13/2003

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