Now a major motion picture,written and directed by Alex Garland and starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac.
The first volume of the extraordinary Southern Reach Trilogy - Annihilation,Authority,Acceptance.
Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years,and much of our predecessor's equipment had rusted ,their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape,I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.
For thirty years,Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border - an environmental disaster zone,though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.
The Southern Reach,a secretive government agency,has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide,another in a hail of gunfire,the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.
Now four women embark on the twelfth expedition into the unknown. Narrated by the nameless biologist,the expedition undertakes their mission to chart and measure the land.
But soon they find they are in the grip of something both strange and all-too-familiar. An unmapped tunnel is not what it seems,at dusk the cries ring out and always,on the horizon,lies the promise of the mysterious lighthouse and the secrets it holds within its grasp.
Described as'a contemporary masterpiece'by the Guardian,The Southern Reach Trilogy is a stunning work of contemporary science fiction that challenges the boundary between known and the unknown,human and alien,terror and limitless beauty.
Read X Marks the Plot,our exclusive interview with Jeff VanderMeer,on the Waterstones Blog
Publisher: HarperCollins PublishersISBN: 9780008139100Number of pages: 208Weight: 200 gDimensions: 198 x 129 x 16 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
Praise for Annihilation and the Southern Reach Trilogy:
'I'm 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
'VanderMeer's 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 Lindsay's 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
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