Absolution
A Southern Reach Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Locus Awards Finalist
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2024:
The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, Time, Kirkus, Literary Hub, Goodreads
The surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series—and the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.
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 bestseller 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 Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had 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, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Do you dare to return to the psychedelic, gorgeous, and horrifying landscape of science fiction author Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X? This adjunct to his critically acclaimed Southern Reach trilogy will take you there, in three connected acts that are set before, during, and after the original story. Talking about the plot is—as always with VanderMeer’s wonderfully discursive books—complicated. Will there be strange flora and fauna, including alligators and rabbits that behave in ways you might not expect? Will there be bureaucracy gone wrong that leads multiple people to their deaths or bizarre fates that you can barely contemplate? Will VanderMeer’s lush, complex prose take you on a delightfully disorienting trip? Let’s just say “check, check, and check” and leave the rest for you to discover on your own. Absolution is probably not the best entry point to Area X for the absolute beginner, but for those of us who love the ecologically themed science fiction of the original series, this is the extra helping that we always wanted.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nebula winner VanderMeer adds an eerie and evocative coda to his Southern Reach horror-fantasy trilogy with this prequel, set two decades prior and illuminating a fatal expedition into what would come to be known as Area X off the southeast coast of a bureaucracy-crippled country. In three discrete narratives told through multiple perspectives, VanderMeer explores the failure of human intelligence to deal with incomprehensible alienness. The first section chronicles the well-funded but doomed scientific expedition into the Forgotten Coast through former spy Old Jim's reading of a long-lost Seance & Science Brigade diary. The second traces Old Jim's tormented attempts to carry out a mind-controlled black op for "Jack," his sinister former partner and now handler. The third and by far the most opaque section follows Lowry, a soldier, through a tragic drugged trip across the Border on orders from Jack, now revealed as a rogue Control agent. Drawing heavily on bioresearch and scientific extrapolations, this foray into the human cost of bureaucratic paranoia and the abandonment of logic to "hope, prayers, and blessings" provokes, mystifies, and challenges readers in turn. VanderMeer's horrifying declaration of the impossibility of knowing the other is a knockout.
