MaddAddam

A man-made plague has all but wiped out humankind. Toby, once a God's Gardener, and the young Ren are among the handful who live on, sheltering in a fragile settlement beside the Crakers, the gentle, genetically engineered people Crake designed.

Amanda, rescued from violent Painball survivors, joins the settlement, and so does Jimmy, whom the Crakers know as Snowman. Together the group starts to rebuild, though the ground under them is shaky.

Toby takes on a young Craker named Blackbeard as a pupil and teaches him to read and write. She also draws out the past of her lover Zeb, then retells it to the Crakers in a simpler form. His account covers his boyhood with the Rev, their father, and with his brother Adam, who becomes Adam One and founds the God's Gardeners. It supplies the history behind the earlier books.

The pigoons and the Painballers press in on the settlement. This is the third and last novel in a trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake (2003) and continued with The Year of the Flood (2009), and it reads best after both. The tone is bleak and darkly comic, and the question it turns on is what a new humanity will inherit from the old.