LoveReading Says
August 2015 Series of the Month.
I am an absolute sucker both for quest-through-the-wilderness tales, and for post-apocalyptic landscapes. Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation delivers both, in creepily brilliant and utterly unforgettable style. Narrated by an unnamed female biologist, it tells of a scientific expedition - the latest of many failed ventures - into a desolate wilderness known as Area X, where they hear a "low, powerful moaning" at dusk. "I would tell you the names of the other three, if it mattered," the biologist tells us, doomily, "but only the surveyor would last more than the next day or two." It all gets progressively more sinister and alien and uncanny and disastrous - I'm not sure I've read a book which scared me, and stayed with me so much, for years - with the story expanded on in the world outside Area X in the following two novels in VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Authority and Acceptance. A slice of dreamily written, haunting literary science fiction flows through the whole trilogy. ~ Alison Flood
The Southern Reach Trilogy:
1. Annihilation
2. Authority
3. Acceptance
Alison Flood
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Annihilation Synopsis
SPECIAL TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson).
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for years. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. Expeditions into Area X have ended in disaster or death.
In
Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the latest expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and the narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers--they discover lifeforms that surpass understanding. But it's the secrets they carried across the border with them that change everything.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781250824042 |
| Publication date: |
30th July 2024 |
| Author: |
Jeff VanderMeer |
| Publisher: |
Picador USA |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
224 pages |
| Series: |
Southern Reach |
| Primary Genre |
Science Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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