Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel (The Southern Reach Series,...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2024:The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, Time, Kirkus, Literary Hub, GoodreadsThe 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.

Alec Nevala-Lee, The New York Times Book Review

"Some of VanderMeer's best writing...deserves to be mentioned alongside Poe, Chesterton and Borges’s other exemplars of the unheimlich, whose confrontation with the uncanny is central to the mission of speculative fiction."

Jess Keiser, The Washington Post

"Againt all odds, Absolution is. . . just as good as the first three novels. It works for the same reason the others did. It manages, once again, to find that rare balance between revealing (the task of the novel) and revealing too much (the danger horror must avoid). Even when it threatens to settle down into the established pattern of its predecessors, it veers, in its final third, into something entirely more alien and alienating. . . Absolution could have dragged the series’ many monsters and mysteries into a clarifying light. Instead, it sticks to the shadows, just where the best horror belongs."

Siri Chilukuri, Mother Jones

"Absolution is the latest and last installment in the lush, eerie series covering an unknown biological phenomenon known as Area X. . . Absolution marks the conclusion of a weird and wonderful journey involving an assortment of biological abnormalities and government secrets. In the meantime, it seems as if the unusual world that VanderMeer wrote about and the one that we live in today are growing closer and closer."

Drew Broussard, Literary Hub

" Not unlike David Lynch going back to Twin Peaks, Absolution is simultaneously unlike anything else VanderMeer has done and also perfectly in line with the works that came before it.”

About the Author

Jeff VanderMeeris the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding.

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