Margaret Atwood (http://margaretatwood.ca/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood) is a hugely respected and loved writer, having been shortlisted for The Booker Prize five times. Her novel of 2003, Oryx and Crake displays her accomplished style, and profound meditations, to good effect.
The summary is as follows. Snowman may be the last man on earth, the only survivor of an unnamed apocalypse. Once he was Jimmy, a member of a scientific elite; now he lives in bitter isolation and loneliness, his only pleasure the watching of old films on DVD. His mind moves backwards and forwards through time, from an agonising trawl through memory to relive the events that led up to sudden catastrophe (most significantly the disappearance of his mother and the arrival of his mysterious childhood companions Oryx and Crake, symbols of the fractured society in which Snowman now finds himself, to the horrifying present of genetic engineering run amok. His only witnesses, eager to lap up his testimony, are “Crakers”, laboratory creatures of varying strengths and abilities, who can offer little comfort. Gradually the reasons behind the disaster begin to unfold as Snowman undertakes a perilous journey to the remains of the bubble-dome complex where the sinister Paradice Project collapsed and near-global devastation began. I think you will enjoy this fiction for its dark humour and chilling prescience.
Enquire at your local library to discover what the not-too-distant future may hold.
448 pages in Virago
First published May 2003
ISBN 978-0349004068
Margaret Atwood