The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Fiction suggested by Shirley
In a future Thailand, calories are the greatest commodity. Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen’s Calorie Man. He combs Bangkok’s street markets in search of food thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history’s lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko, the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature, an engineered being, now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok.
What happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution?