Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

Written by Margaret Atwood
Read by John Chancer
Format: MP3

Oryx and Crake is a 2003 novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. She has described the novel as speculative fiction and adventure romance, rather than pure science fiction, because it does not deal with things “we can’t yet do or begin to do”, yet goes beyond the amount of realism she associates with the novel form. It focuses on a lone character called Snowman, who finds himself in a bleak situation with only creatures called Crakers to keep him company. The reader learns of his past, as a boy called Jimmy, and of genetic experimentation and pharmaceutical engineering that occurred under the purview of Jimmy’s peer, Glenn “Crake”.

The book was first published by McClelland and Stewart. It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, as well as for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction.

A television adaptation of Oryx and Crake and its follow-up novels, The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013), was being helmed by Darren Aronofsky by 2014, under the working title “MaddAddam”, but was dropped by HBO by October 2016. Currently, an adaptation of the MadAddam trilogy is in development at Paramount Television and Anonymous Content.

Amazon Review

A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize

Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that listeners may find their view of the world forever changed after listening to it.

This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For listeners of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again.

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 humor, 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.

Audible Informations
https://www.audible.com/pd/Oryx-and-Crake-Audiobook/B002V9Z3JG
Oryx and Crake
By Margaret Atwood
Narrated by John Chancer
Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
Categories: Fiction, Literary