Absolution (The Southern Reach Series, Bk. 4)
Price:
Available: 25+
copies bought in the last week
Finalist for the Locus Awards
A new instalment in the Southern Reach Series, Absolution reaches back decades before the enigmatic “Area X” emerges.
The novel opens on a science expedition to the remote “Forgotten Coast”, an operation whose mysterious end signals far-reaching consequences.
Many years later, a worn-out operative known as Old Jim stumbles upon archived files from that expedition and begins to unravel a vast, disturbing pattern of government agency meddling with forces beyond comprehension.
As the narrative threads converge, the boundaries between past, present, and speculative future blur in unsettling fashions — the book operates both as a direct precursor to the original trilogy and as its own atmospheric, unsettling conclusion.
"Some of VanderMeer’s best writing… deserves to be mentioned alongside Poe, Chesterton and Borges’s other exemplars of the unheimlich." — Alec Nevala-Lee (The New York Times Book Review)"Against all odds, Absolution is … just as good as the first three novels. … it veers … into something entirely more alien and alienating." — Jess Keiser (The Washington Post)
"An eerie and evocative coda … This foray … provokes, mystifies, and challenges readers in turn." — Publishers Weekly