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