Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003) is the first novel in the MaddAddam trilogy, set in the aftermath of a engineered pandemic that has effectively ended human civilization. The sole survivor, a man calling himself Snowman, lives on a ruined coastline among dangerous transgenic animals and a community of bio-designed humanoids known as the Crakers, gentle creatures who regard him as a kind of prophet. Through fragmented memory, the novel reconstructs the world that preceded the catastrophe: a corporate dystopia of gated Compounds where biotechnology firms operate without ethical oversight, strictly segregated from the impoverished, chaotic pleeblands beyond their walls. At the center of that history is Snowman's friendship with Crake, a genetics prodigy who concludes that human suffering cannot be meaningfully reduced without eliminating the species responsible for it, and who acts on that conclusion. Oryx and Crake is less a disaster novel than a reckoning with the conditions that make disaster not just possible but logical.

Signed copy. True Canadian first edition, published by McClelland & Stewart, preceding the American edition. Signed by Atwood on the title page.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, grey cloth boards ruled and stamped in gilt along spine. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003. ISBN: 0771008686. #10538.
Fine in fine dust jacket.