This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers 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 humour, 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.

- "God Blake, you're a true enigma" Her eyes widened slightly at his words. "I don't understand" she claimed, backing up a step from him, which he had clearly noticed. And to her shock, he took a step forward, blocking the gap she had just created. "You seriously don't see what I was trying to do up there?!" he asked, almost in disbelief. "Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting to do that?!" she couldn't believe how loud he was suddenly. She had always known Lucian as a calm person with a soft, almost brooding voice that he never raised. Now it almost sounded excited, it was interesting seeing a new side of Lucian Black. - Something is happening at Cross Climb High-school Although it seems fairly normal, students going amongst their days unbeknownst to who they travel life beside. Blake Collins was forced to move schools, along with her four best friends. With her mother dead and her father in prison for attempting to murder her brother, she's in foster care, struggling every day with panic attacks and obsessive thoughts from a past of psychological damage. In her new school, she deals with not only her constant daily struggle to maintain normalcy, but also somehow becoming the director of the school play. Add a crush on the school's bad boy, Zac, who seems more interested in Stella, Blake's promiscuous best friend and also contending with another one of the school's popular boys, Lucian, chasing her constantly despite firmly keeping up her barriers. Everything seems fairly normal, at least at first. But, brewing nearby is a rage so intense that it's about to bubble over, and when strange things start happening around her, Blake can't help but fear the worst events will unfold and hope that it won't take the lives of those she loves along with her own. Be careful, because you never know what people are really thinking. - *Warning* Swear words, violence, thoughts of self harm, and spelling mistakes that I need to fix and I swear I will.