Absolution

(Paperback)

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Description

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, the surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeers blockbuster Southern Reach Trilogy.
When the Southern Reach Trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestsellers list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.

And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coastbefore Area X was called Area Xhad never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance How crazy would they seem

Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

Reviews

Praise for the Southern Reach Trilogy:

Im loving the Southern Reach Trilogy Creepy and fascinating Stephen King

Hauntingly weird and brilliantly new These are contemporary masterpieces and career-defining novels Adam Robert, Books of the Year, Guardian

This trilogy is a modern mycological masterpiece Remarkable Tense, eerie and unsettling VanderMeer writes much better prose than Poe ever did This is genuinely potent and dream-haunting writing. VanderMeer has arrived Guardian

A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alike Annihilation shows signs of being the novel that will allow VanderMeer to break through to a new and larger audience Sunday Telegraph

A lasting monument to the uncanny You find yourself afraid to turn the page Guardian

VanderMeers novel is a psycho-geographical tour de force, channelling Ballard and Lovecraft to instil the reader with a deep, delicious unease Financial Times

What a haunting book this is, lodging deep in the memory in similar fashion to otherworldly classics such as David Lindsays A Voyage To Arcturus Annihilation is so disquietingly strange as to defy summarisation. Read it Daily Mail

Astonishing, frightening, spectacular I hope the trilogy will come to be seen not only as the instant sci-fi classic it is, but also as Literature New Statesman

Immersive, insightful and often deeply bloody creepy, this is a startlingly good novel A major work ***** SFX Magazine

A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unravelling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot of Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and claustrophobic dread that lingers long afterwards. I loved it Lauren Beukes

Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent Warren Ellis

Author Bio

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of Americas American Fantastic Tales and in multiple years-best anthologies. He writes non-fiction for the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife.