Parable of the Sower

'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' GLORIA STEINEM

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.

'Unnervingly prescient and wise' YAA GYASI

'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. One cannot exaggerate the impact she has had' JUNOT DIAZ

'Butler's evocative, often troubling, novels explore far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human' NEW YORK TIMES

'An icon of the Afrofuturism world, envisioning literary realms that placed black characters front and center' VANITY FAIR

'Octavia Butler was a visionary' VIOLA DAVIS