Acceptance
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3.8 • 65 Ratings
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
’A contemporary masterpiece’ Guardian
THE THIRD VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY – NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN, OSCAR ISAAC, GINA RODRIGUEZ AND TESSA THOMPSON
It is winter in Area X. A new team embarks across the border, on a mission to find a member of a previous expedition who may have been left behind. As they press deeper into the unknown – navigating new terrain and new challenges – the threat to the outside world becomes only more daunting. In this last instalment of the Southern Reach Trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may have been solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound – or terrifying.
Reviews
Praise for ACCEPTANCE 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
‘Astonishing, frightening, spectacular … The imaginative daring and reach with which VanderMeer has invented and executed a concept such as Area X is breathtaking … Powerful and echoing’ 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
About the author
Jeff VanderMeer’s New York Times–bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy has been translated into more than thirty-seven languages. The first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. His other books include Hummingbird Salamander, Dead Astronauts, Borne (in development as a TV series at AMC), and The Strange Bird. VanderMeer has lectured at MIT, Yale, Vanderbilt, and Columbia. Most recently, he gave the John Hersey Memorial Address at the Key West Literary Seminar. His Florida reporting has appeared in Current Affairs, TIME, the Nation, and Esquire. VanderMeer lives in Tallahassee.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The concluding volume of VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (after Annihilation and Authority) brings each of the series's narrative threads together for an enigmatic but satisfying conclusion. In Annihilation, a single survivor from one of exploratory expeditions to Area X discusses her experiences, a portion of the southern U.S. that has become inexplicably isolated from the rest of the world and from which few visitors return. Authority, the second volume, is a conspiratorial tale about the highly secretive Southern Reach, the organization that, in theory, is attempting to uncover the secrets of the Zone. The story is related by its newly appointed director, Control, who, like many of the characters in the earlier books, reappears in Acceptance. Others about whom we have heard earlier also pop up, including Saul Evans, the lighthouse keeper, who was one of the first to experience the Zone. The third book begins with another expedition as a team reenters Area X in search of a lost member. In many ways, this is the most mysterious and puzzling book of the three: VanderMeer employs multiple flashbacks and POVs, which contribute to a multifaceted, mutating portrait of Area X. The pacing of the narrative is slower, but the reader will want to move slowly so as not to miss any of the more subtle occurrences or psychological insights. By the time the book is finished, the reader knows that this trilogy is that rare thing a set in which the whole is as great as the parts.
Customer Reviews
A bit disappointing
The first book was brilliant and perhaps I missed something, but the two sequels did not match up to it
Overly confusing for the sake of it
After finishing the third and final book in the series, barely a single question is actually fully answered. I am all for authors hinting at answers, rather than outright stating them, but this book felt like the author was being overly vague and confusing purely for the sake of it. Looking at forums many readers have created lists of what everything MIGHT mean, but with no real solid answers that is all you are left with, at best, educated guesses.
Hard slog
What can I say three books down and I'm still the no wiser, over complicated, stuttering from start to stop start stop.