Parable of the Sower

The extraordinary, prescient New York Times bestseller - a modern classic about a young girl fighting for survival in a post-apocalyptic world. 'If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true. This is what makes Parable of the Sower even more impressive than it was when first published' GLORIA STEINEM 'Unnervingly prescient and wise' YAA GYASI We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time. The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from the violence breaking out across America. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to feel the pain of others, records everything she sees of the fracturing world in her journal. One terrible night, her home is overrun, and Lauren sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.
But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling vision of a better way to live - and the birth of a new faith that will change humanity forever. PRAISE FOR OCTAVIA E. BUTLER '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 'Butler's prose, always pared back to the bone, delineates the painful paradoxes of metamorphosis with compelling precision' GUARDIAN 'Octavia Butler was a visionary' VIOLA DAVIS 'One of the most significant literary artists of the twentieth century. One cannot exaggerate the impact she has had' JUNOT DIAZ 'An icon of the Afrofuturism world, envisioning literary realms that placed black characters front and center' VANITY FAIR 'Butler writes with such a familiarity that the alien is welcome and intriguing. She really artfully exposes our human impulse to self-destruct' LUPITA NYONG'O

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER (1947-2006) was the renowned author of numerous ground-breaking novels, including Kindred, Wild Seed, and Parable of the Sower. Recipient of the Locus, Hugo and Nebula awards, and a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work, in 1995 she became the first science-fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship 'genius grant'. A pioneer of her genre, Octavia's dystopian novels explore myriad themes of Black injustice, women's rights, global warming and political and economic disparity, and her work is taught in over two hundred colleges and universities nationwide.
In 2020, Octavia E. Butler became a New York Times bestselling author.