Recommendations
Books Like Oryx and Crake
Best books to read after Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is the first volume of the MaddAddam trilogy — a biotech dystopia in which Snowman (Jimmy) is apparently the last human survivor of a plague engineered by his brilliant, sociopathic best friend Crake. These recommendations continue the Atwood canon, explore the tradition of the literary dystopian novel of genetic engineering and corporate power, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel about what happens when science is completely unmoored from ethics.
- 1Buy
The Year of the Flood
by Margaret Atwood
The companion MaddAddam novel — a parallel narrative set in the same timeline as Oryx and Crake, following the members of a religious environmental group called God's Gardeners through the same plague; the natural continuation that gives the catastrophe a human scale and a different emotional register from Snowman's perspective.
- 2Buy
MaddAddam
by Margaret Atwood
The concluding MaddAddam volume — brings together the survivors from Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, completing the trilogy's investigation of what happens after the end of civilization; essential for readers who want the full story.
- 3Buy
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
The essential companion Atwood dystopia — Offred's account of the theocratic Republic of Gilead; shares Oryx and Crake's interest in a future in which human society has reorganized itself around a single brutal logic, though Gilead's is religious power where Crake's is corporate biotech.
- 4Buy
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The companion literary novel of genetic dystopia — Kathy H. and her friends at Hailsham, raised as organ donors; shares Oryx and Crake's interest in what happens when genetic technology is used to create human beings who exist only to serve the needs of others.
- 5Buy
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
The companion literary post-apocalyptic novel — survivors of a flu pandemic twenty years later, the Traveling Symphony performing Shakespeare in the ruins; shares Oryx and Crake's interest in what survives of human civilization after catastrophic plague, with a more hopeful aesthetic and a different relationship to art.
- 6Buy
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
The darkest companion post-apocalyptic novel — a man and his son crossing a devastated American landscape; where Oryx and Crake is formally playful and satirical about the way we got here, The Road is purely about what surviving after catastrophe requires from a parent.
- 7Buy
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
The predecessor biotech dystopia — a world in which human beings are manufactured in hatcheries, conditioned for their social caste, and kept docile by a pleasure drug called soma; the twentieth-century foundational text for the genetic-engineering dystopia that Oryx and Crake extends into the twenty-first century.
- 8Buy
The Drowned World
by J.G. Ballard
The companion literary climate dystopia — Ballard's 1962 novel about a flooded London, its characters adapting to a prehistoric climate and discovering unsuspected desires for regression; the British predecessor in the tradition of the literary disaster novel that does not resolve its catastrophe optimistically.
More Oryx and Crake Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.