Margaret Atwood's classic novel 'The Handmaid's Tale' is about the future. Now, in 'Oryx And Crake', the future has changed. It's much worse. And we're well on the road to it now.
The narrator of Margaret Atwood's riveting new novel is Snowman, self-named though not self-created. As the story opens, he's sleeping in a tree, wearing a dirty old bed-sheet, mourning the loss of his beautiful and beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death.
Earlier, Snowman's life was one of comparative privilege. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Was he himself in any way responsible? Why is he now left alone with his bizarre memories - alone except for the more-than-perfect green-eyed Children of Crake, who regard him as some kind of monster? The answers to these questions lie in the past - in his double journey into memory 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 all-too-conceivable future of our own world, an outlandish yet wholly believable place left devastated by scientific disaster and populated by a cast of characters who will continue to inhabit your dreams long after the book is closed.
