
'The Octavia Butler novel for our times' THE ATLANTIC
'My book of the year . . . completely devours the genre which gave rise to it' JUNOT DÍAZ
The final ground-breaking novel from renowned, bestselling author Octavia E. Butler.
A young girl wakes up in the woods, gravely injured and alone, with no memory of what happened or who she is.
As Shori heals, she realises that she isn't like the people around her, which leads to a shocking discovery. She is a fifty-three-year-old vampire, and in terrible danger.
To save herself, Shori must learn anew everything about the power and desires that she holds, the life that was stolen from her - and those who want her dead.
PRAISE FOR OCTAVIA E. BUTLER, THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
'In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time... for sheer peculiar prescience, Butler's novel may be unmatched' NEW YORKER
'Octavia Butler was playing out our very real possibilities as humans. I think she can help each of us to do the same' GLORIA STEINEM
'Butler's prose, always pared back to the bone, delineates the painful paradoxes of metamorphosis with compelling precision' GUARDIAN
'One of the most significant literary artists of the twentieth century' JUNOT DIAZ
'Octavia Butler was a visionary' VIOLA DAVIS
'Her evocative, often troubling, novels explore far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human' NEW YORK TIMES
An American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. [Comment by Tricia Sullivan, on The Guardian][1]: Octavia E Butler (1947–2006) > I was teaching in New York when I came across Octavia E Butler's Kindred in a secondary-school catalogue of novels recommended to support diversity. It caught my attention because Butler was described as a science-fiction writer. I thought I was familiar with science fiction, but I'd never heard of her – nor have a great many other readers, I suspect. For many years, Butler was the sole African-American woman novelist in science fiction. Kindred tells the wrenching and unforgettable story of a young black woman who time-travels and saves the life of her slaveholder ancestor, but it is, in Butler's words, "a grim fantasy", not science fiction. > Beginning in the 1970s, Butler wrote three sequences of novels: the Patternist books, the Lilith's Brood series and the Parable novels (incomplete at her tragic death in 2006). Critically respected, she won the Hugo and Nebula awards, received a Clarke nomination, the PEN lifetime achievement award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. A serious writer working in a field that is seldom taken seriously, Butler addressed biological control, gender, humanity's relationship with aliens, genetics and even the development of a fictional religion. Her narratives leave space for the reader's involvement while exploring the nature of change. They gaze unflinchingly on power dynamics. "Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles," Butler stated, "and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together." Butler's writing is courageous, stimulating and infused with a rare purity of intention. Crushingly, she died at the height of her powers. [Bloodchild and Other Stories][2] is a good place to begin discovering her work. [1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice [2]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL35621W/Bloodchild_and_other_stories

'The Octavia Butler novel for our times' THE ATLANTIC
'My book of the year . . . completely devours the genre which gave rise to it' JUNOT DÍAZ
The final ground-breaking novel from renowned, bestselling author Octavia E. Butler.
A young girl wakes up in the woods, gravely injured and alone, with no memory of what happened or who she is.
As Shori heals, she realises that she isn't like the people around her, which leads to a shocking discovery. She is a fifty-three-year-old vampire, and in terrible danger.
To save herself, Shori must learn anew everything about the power and desires that she holds, the life that was stolen from her - and those who want her dead.
PRAISE FOR OCTAVIA E. BUTLER, THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
'In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time... for sheer peculiar prescience, Butler's novel may be unmatched' NEW YORKER
'Octavia Butler was playing out our very real possibilities as humans. I think she can help each of us to do the same' GLORIA STEINEM
'Butler's prose, always pared back to the bone, delineates the painful paradoxes of metamorphosis with compelling precision' GUARDIAN
'One of the most significant literary artists of the twentieth century' JUNOT DIAZ
'Octavia Butler was a visionary' VIOLA DAVIS
'Her evocative, often troubling, novels explore far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human' NEW YORK TIMES
An American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. [Comment by Tricia Sullivan, on The Guardian][1]: Octavia E Butler (1947–2006) > I was teaching in New York when I came across Octavia E Butler's Kindred in a secondary-school catalogue of novels recommended to support diversity. It caught my attention because Butler was described as a science-fiction writer. I thought I was familiar with science fiction, but I'd never heard of her – nor have a great many other readers, I suspect. For many years, Butler was the sole African-American woman novelist in science fiction. Kindred tells the wrenching and unforgettable story of a young black woman who time-travels and saves the life of her slaveholder ancestor, but it is, in Butler's words, "a grim fantasy", not science fiction. > Beginning in the 1970s, Butler wrote three sequences of novels: the Patternist books, the Lilith's Brood series and the Parable novels (incomplete at her tragic death in 2006). Critically respected, she won the Hugo and Nebula awards, received a Clarke nomination, the PEN lifetime achievement award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. A serious writer working in a field that is seldom taken seriously, Butler addressed biological control, gender, humanity's relationship with aliens, genetics and even the development of a fictional religion. Her narratives leave space for the reader's involvement while exploring the nature of change. They gaze unflinchingly on power dynamics. "Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles," Butler stated, "and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together." Butler's writing is courageous, stimulating and infused with a rare purity of intention. Crushingly, she died at the height of her powers. [Bloodchild and Other Stories][2] is a good place to begin discovering her work. [1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice [2]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL35621W/Bloodchild_and_other_stories