’A contemporary masterpiece’ guardian the first volume of the extraordinary southern reach trilogy now a major motion picture written and directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina) and starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac 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.


Praise for 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

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and in multiple year’s-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.