Buying Options
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

![Parable of the Talents by [Octavia E. Butler]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41g0EdkUozL._SY346_.jpg)
Parable of the Talents Kindle Edition
Octavia E. Butler (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
Price | New from | Used from |
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial |
Mass Market Paperback
"Please retry" | — | $12.74 |
Preloaded Digital Audio Player, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
—
| — | — |
- Kindle
$0.00 Read with Kindle Unlimited to also enjoy access to over 1 million more titles $12.34 to buy -
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your Audible trial - Hardcover
$19.29 - Paperback
$12.99 - Mass Market Paperback
$19.99 - Preloaded Digital Audio Player
—
Lauren Olamina was only eighteen when her family was killed, and anarchy encroached on her Southern California home. She fled the war zone for the hope of quiet and safety in the north. There she founded Acorn, a peaceful community based on a religion of her creation, called Earthseed, whose central tenet is that God is change. Five years later, Lauren has married a doctor and given birth to a daughter. Acorn is beginning to thrive. But outside the tranquil group’s walls, America is changing for the worse.
Presidential candidate Andrew Steele Jarret wins national fame by preaching a return to the values of the American golden age. To his marauding followers, who are identified by their crosses and black robes, this is a call to arms to end religious tolerance and racial equality—a brutal doctrine they enforce by machine gun. And as this band of violent extremists sets its deadly sights on Earthseed, Acorn is plunged into a harrowing fight for its very survival.
Taking its place alongside Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Butler’s eerily prophetic novel offers a terrifying vision of our potential future, but also one of hope.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author’s estate.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
- Publication dateJuly 24, 2012
- File size5557 KB
![]() |
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
- Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.Highlighted by 1,272 Kindle readers
- How much of this nonsense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule?Highlighted by 1,205 Kindle readers
- Beware: At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease.Highlighted by 875 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
From the Illustrated Biography
|
|
|
---|---|---|
Octavia E. Butler at age thirteenButler began writing the year before when a science fiction film—the cult favorite Devil Girl from Mars—inspired her to create something of her own. |
Parable of the Sower book tourButler on a book tour for Parable of the Sower in New York City in 1993. |
Octavia E. Butler's legacyWhen Butler passed away in 2006, the New York Times eulogized her as a world-renowned author whose science fiction explored 'far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human.' |
Editorial Reviews
Review
About the Author
Amazon.com Review
In Parable of the Talents, the seeds of change that Lauren planted begin to bear fruit, but in unpredictable and brutal ways. Her small community is destroyed, her child is kidnapped, and she is imprisoned by sadistic zealots. She must find a way to escape and begin again, without family or friends. Her single-mindedness in teaching Earthseed may be her only chance to survive, but paradoxically, may cause the ultimate estrangement of her beloved daughter. Parable of the Talents is told from both mother's and daughter's perspectives, but it is the narrative of Lauren's grown daughter, who has seen her mother made into a deity of sorts, that is the most compelling. Butler's writing is simple and elegant, and her storytelling skills are superb, as usual. Fans will be eagerly awaiting the next installment in what promises to be a moving and adventurous saga. --Therese Littleton
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Library Journal
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Booklist
From the Back Cover
Product details
- ASIN : B008HALPHC
- Publisher : Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy (July 24, 2012)
- Publication date : July 24, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 5557 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 434 pages
- Lending : Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #14,254 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

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 disparity, and her work is taught in over two hundred colleges and universities nationwide.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon
Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2020
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
In one of her interviews given just a couple of years before she passed away, as always speaking in that deep, authoritative voice of hers that makes you instinctively trust what she says, Octavia Butler declares that it is foolish of writers to think that they can predict the future. “When we write about the future,” she says, “what we actually write about is the present, but more of it—more advanced, harder, higher, faster.” Even though she overshoots by 15 years, it is ironic how wrong she was and how much she underestimated her own ability to see the future—even though I suspect she would be much happier if she had failed, at least in this particular case. This book is living proof that bigotry, opportunism and stupidity do indeed transcend time, space as well as generations.
Parable of the Talents is set in the aftermath of a socioeconomic and climatic calamity that has shaken the world to its core and is a direct sequel to Butler's Parable of the Sower, in itself a harrowing apocalyptic journey along the highways of an America that has disintegrated into violence, anarchy and rampant drug use. Olamina has found a safe haven for herself and her followers who she met on the road, but can her community and her nascent teaching suffer the head-on collision with President Jarret’s rising religious fundamentalism?
The book is interesting enough to read for its literary merits. The story and the characters—albeit probably not for the faint of heart—are brilliant and engrossing. What I find far more interesting though and what I also think will transcend time (as it has transcended these since 20 years since the novel was written) are Butler's universal insights into human nature: How easy it is for scared people to flock under the wing of anyone who seems strong and decisive. How quickly ordinary people can turn into monsters. How dangerous are ignorance and prejudice. How tempting is to stop thinking and to let someone else think for you.
These simple truths have outlived Butler and will unfortunately most likely outlive us all.
Okay, so this creeped me out, in a dystopian novel set in the 2020's - 2030's, published in 1998. There was a LOT that creeped me out: religious fanatics persecuting "heathens" who don't follow the Christian American party line. Beatings, murder, enslavement, rape, stealing of their children... It's an excellent book, very well-written, a classic, but make sure you have emotional support to get through, if these issues trigger you. I found it a difficult read because I couldn't convince myself this would never happen in America, right now.
I found these sections particularly insightful, about this character:
"The working poor who love Jarret want to be fooled, need to be fooled. They scratch a living, working long, hard hours at dangerous, dirty jobs, and they need a savior. Poor women, in particular, tend to be deeply religious and more than willing to see Jarret as the Second Coming. Religion is all they have. Their employers and their men abuse them. They bear more children than they can feed. They bear everyone’s contempt." and
"And the thugs see him as one of them. They envy him. He is the bigger, the more successful thief, murderer, and slaver."
The story is told from the points of view of the Earthseed founder, Lauren Oya Olamina, and her daughter, Asha Vere, and comes to a fairly satisfying conclusion. This is the second in what was meant to be a trilogy, but you don't have to read the first book to understand or appreciate this one.
I particularly relished and saw modern day parallels in this: "In less than a year, Jarret went from being our savior, almost the Second Coming in some people’s minds, to being an incompetent son of a bitch who was wasting our substance on things that didn’t matter."
Top reviews from other countries

Nearly all of the story occurs within a prison camp and given the narrative style this is told largely through diary entries listing abuses by the guards, including torture, many rapes, and the (inadvertent?) death of several characters. These events are unpleasant to hear about and not very original. Moreover, a diary was poor choice of narrative device for these scenes because events that should be exciting and emotionally charged do not happen in real time, but are described through great dumps of exposition. As a result it is boring to read the abusive scenes are stripped of nearly all the emotional significance.
In my view this book should have been rejected by the publisher and the author advised to substantially rework it. The narrative can't decide if it is a story about a religious cult and their internment in an abusive prison camp run by religious extremists (a social and political commentary story that requires exploration of multiple interned characters and involves a number of action scenes), or a story about the family relationships of the central character (an individual story centred on emotions). As it is the novel falls between two stools, so neither of the stories is properly developed. I would only recommend this book as a cautionary example for overconfident novelists!

It begins five years after the settlement of Acorn, the Earthseed community founded at the end of the first book, and initially shows us the ways in which the community has grown and adapted to the ongoing social collapse that is taking place in the rest of the United States. For a short while life in the community seems good, though there is an undercurrent of possible danger presented in the form of Presidential hopeful Andrew Steele Jarrett, a Christian hardliner who believes that only a return to 'traditional Christian values' will help the country return to its former glory. Even despite Acorn's success, Lauren is also fighting against her own husband's desire to move them away from the community to somewhere 'safer', especially after she becomes pregnant; his fear of the future works directly in opposition to her inherent optimism, and the reader is given a deeper understanding of both sides of the argument as a result of their interaction.
Things begin to fall apart when Jarrett is elected as President, and shortly afterwards the community is attacked by a group of Christian America (CA) Crusaders, the members of the community enslaved. This is where the novel enters its darkest phase as we are given first hand accounts of the abuses meted out on Lauren's people. The children of the community, including Lauren's newborn baby, are taken away, and the men and women of the community are segregated and kept apart. Everything they have built for themselves is torn down and destroyed, and Acorn itself is transformed into a concentration camp, rapidly populated with new internees as the CA Crusaders seek to enslave and dehumanise those they see as a threat to their Christian traditions.
The third act of the novel begins with the prisoners at Acorn winning their freedom, though there is a sense of deus ex machina interjected at this point; the slavers themselves are rendered all but impotent when their living quarters are demolished as a result of a mudslide, allowing the prisoners to break free of their chains and escape. Lauren then sets out to locate and rescue as many of the lost children as possible, particularly her own lost daughter. Along the way we're given a broader picture of the world beyond the confines of Acorn, and it's suggested that those on the outside either don't care about the atrocities being committed by the Crusaders or simply aren't willing to believe that they'd be capable of such acts.
Lauren finally finds her daughter several years later, though the meeting between them is somewhat bittersweet. During her travels Lauren has managed to sow the seeds of a much larger Earthseed movement, while her daughter has been raised in a predominantly Christian manner, albeit while maintaining a degree of skepticism along the way. While there's no happy reunion between them, there is a reconciliation of sorts.
The narrative throughout the book alternates between the voice of Lauren herself, in the form of journal entries, and the voice of her daughter, Larkin, who we eventually learn has been separated from her mother for most of her life. By juxtaposing the two voices in this way we get a strong sense that while Larkin admires and respects the achievements of her mother, it's made clear that she doesn't necessarily agree with her mother's motives and beliefs.
In conclusion, if Parable of the Sower was a dark and disturbing read, this book is even more so. For that reason I'd consider it to outstanding, and definitely worth a read, though it should be noted that some of the themes the book explores may be triggering for some readers.



This is a book that speaks to the here and now. If you're concerned about what is happening in the world today, read it. If you have ever asked yourself about religion and the function it serves in our society, read it. If you just like a good book with a strong storyline, read it. It can offer something on all of these levels, and personally speaking, I have yet to stop thinking about the questions it raises.