Review" ORYX AND CRAKE by Margaret Atwood

Barely surviving in a devastated and de-populated world, a man called Snowman recalls the events of his life that have led to what he is now: a shadow of his former self, slowly starving to death. Snowman thinks about his best friend Crake, an intellectual (otherwise known as a geek), who, despite his perplexing and secretive manner, was nevertheless on the road to greatness. Oryx, the only person of his generation Snowman could truly love, seemed so unreachable. His mother, a riddle, vanished, and though he tried to put her memory behind him, he continued searching for her for years. His father, cold and distant, considered his only son an afterthought.

As snowman searches through his memory, he looks for clues, the what ifs, to help him understand how the world changed so suddenly. He ponders how if he’d only read the signs, had not ignored the portentous dropped phrase from Crake here and there, he might have known what was coming. But then what? Could he have stopped it? Now all he has for company are the Crakers, a race of beings who are dependent on Snowman for answers to their questions about a world that they were born into, a world innocent of war, famine, violence and all the other outrages and misfortunes the human race brought upon itself.