The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...
Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues 
run rampant across the globe.
What Happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution? Award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi delivers one of the most highly acclaimed science fiction novels of the twenty-first century. From Goodreads

My husband suggested this book for me as one of the books for the 2012 Sci-Fi Challenge I am taking part in. I thought he had read it since he suggested it but it turned out that he hadn't! Well I read it anyway. It was definitely not a book I would have picked up myself. But it ended up being quite an interesting book. I found it a bit slow in the beginning but suddenly it caught me and I just wanted to know what was going to happen. It is Sci-Fi but I don't think the actual state of the world in this book is so far fetched and that makes for a chilling reading.

This book qualifies for: 
100 books in a year Reading Challenge 2012, 
Goodreads 2012 Reading Challenge, 
2012 Ebook Challenge,
A-Z  Book Challenge 2012,
2012 Sci-Fi Challenge,
2012 Where are you reading Challenge