Annihilation

SPECIAL TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that ＂reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world＂ (Kim Stanley Robinson).

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for years. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. Expeditions into Area X have ended in disaster or death.

In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the latest expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and the narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers--they discover lifeforms that surpass understanding. But it’s the secrets they carried across the border with them that change everything.

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 nonfiction 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