Oryx And Crake - Tapa blanda

The writing is spare. The structure is tight. The observation of the human condition is both profound and impish. Character is crucial. The issues are huge and we feel the weight of them. Finally, it leaves the reader on a cliff-edge the like of which I have never encountered elsewhere. It was nominated for the Man Booker. I think it should have won (Anita Mason Guardian)

Atwood at her best - dark, dry, scabrously witty, yet moving and studded with flashes of pure poetry. Her gloriously inventive brave new world is all the more chilling because of the mirror it holds up to our own (Lisa Appignanesi, The Independent Magazine)

Atwood herself is one of our finest linguistic engineers. Her carefully calibrated sentences are formulated to hook and paralyse the reader (Saturday Telegraph)

Enlivening, deadpan wit and the mix of empathy and insight she always brings to her characters . . . Saturated in science, the novel is simulatneously alive with literary resonances . . . superlatively gripping and remarkably imagined (Observer)

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye and Alias Grace have all been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and now Oryx and Crake for the 2003 Booker prize. She has won many literary prizes in other countries.