Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

This book is a post-apocalyptic vision told mainly in flashback by the last surviving human, a man who used to be a boy named Jimmy and now calls himself Snowman.
It's also a story of the triangle between Jimmy, a beautiful woman named Oryx, and a scientific genius and Jimmy's childhood friend - Crake.
Even in Jimmy's childhood, the world is still in a time at least (hopefully) a little bit in the future. The coastal cities have all been submerged and there is no New York, only New New York.
This book pushes you along quite fervently to figure out _what really happened_ to the world, to bring about the scenario in which Snowman is living on a beach, supported and leading a group of genetically designed post-humans he calls the "Children of Crake."
There's also the sub-mystery of what happened to the world to bring out the closer future from Jimmy's childhood.
I read some of Atwood's essays on the site linked from the book cover above - she said that she had already started writing this novel when September 11 happened and she had to stop writing for several weeks - as it was hard to write about a fictional world tragedy when a real one was actually going on.
I bought this at Kepler's Books on Saturday, Feb. 12 and had finished it by Sunday Feb. 13

This book also reminds me of "The City Not Long After" by Pat Murphy, which I also fell in love with when I read it a few years ago. (You can't say no to any book where San Francisco has been taken over by the artist community and someone has painted the Golden Gate Bridge blue.) Pat Murphy and her group of Brazen Hussies(2 more great writers) will get their own blog entry - I just looked her up on the web and am also intrigued by many of the books written by the other Hussies, especially Dark Cities Underground by Lisa Goldstein which apparently ties together children's books with the BART system somehow...