Parable of the Sower

· Open Road Media
4.5
123 reviews
Ebook
299
Pages

About this ebook

A New York Times Notable Book: In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.

“A stunner.” —Flea, musician and actor, TheWall Street Journal
 
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.
 
When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.
 
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author’s estate.

Ratings and reviews

4.5
123 reviews
ecayn1
January 12, 2021
Awesome author and book, and this comes from someone who is not into sci-fi, but her books are so much more! I too stumbled across her book and couldn't put it down. She truly had a gift- her books are still very relevant. She is now one of the Ancestors!
Derrick Harris
April 23, 2013
I am really sorry I hadn't read anything from Octavia Butler until now but it was worth finally getting around to it. As a rabid scifi fan and an African American I should be ashamed I never read one of the great scifi authors of all time. Normally I like hard scifi with a decidedly technology edge to it but this had none of this at all. It was more like "The Road" with a less depressing tone and ending. I did like the realism she created in the book with just one hard to believe aspect that I actually enjoyed even though it was a bit of soft scifi. I actually really got attached to the main character Lauren and the whole group of travelers. Great book. I am already planning to read more of Octavia's work now that I have discovered her after she passed away.
41 people found this review helpful
A Google user
December 20, 2014
The Parable of the Sower is one of my favorite Octavia Butler books. I like the dystopian aspect, as well as the sotto voce derision of organized religion. Highly recommend.
7 people found this review helpful

About the author

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was a bestselling and award-winning author, considered one of the best science fiction writers of her generation. She received both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and in 1995 became the first author of science fiction to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. She was also awarded the prestigious PEN Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. Her first novel, Patternmaster (1976), was praised both for its imaginative vision and for Butler’s powerful prose, and spawned four prequels, beginning with Mind of My Mind (1977) and finishing with Clay’s Ark (1984). Although the Patternist series established Butler among the science fiction elite, it was Kindred (1979), a story of a black woman who travels back in time to the antebellum South, that brought her mainstream success. In 1985, Butler won Nebula and Hugo awards for the novella “Bloodchild,” and in 1987 she published Dawn, the first novel of the Xenogenesis trilogy, about a race of aliens who visit earth to save humanity from itself. Fledgling (2005) was Butler’s final novel. She died at her home in 2006. 

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