Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, now calls himself Snowman and lives in a tree, wrapped in old bed sheets. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility. Welcome to the outrageous imagination of Margaret Atwood. 'In Jimmy, Atwood has created a great character: a tragic-comic artist of the future, part buffoon, part Orpheus. An adman who's a sad man; a jealous lover who's in perpetual mourning; a fantasist who can only remember the past' Lisa Appignanesi, Independent 'The novel is about hubris and humans playing god - literally, in the case of Crake, the embittered genius whose secret project is responsible for the devastation that now surrounds Snowman' Joan Smith, Observer 'Superlatively gripping and remarkably imagined . . . the novel is simultaneously alive with literary resonances' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times 'A success and a breakthrough . . . a highly cinematic adventure story of daring and survival' Elaine Showalter, London Review of Books