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Learn moreIt is winter in Area X. A new team embarks across the border on a mission to find a member of a previous expedition who may have been left behind. As they press deeper into the unknown—navigating new terrain and new challenges—the threat to the outside world becomes only more daunting.
In the final installment of the Southern Reach Trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may have been solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound—or terrifying.
Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and in multiple anthologies. His recent books have made the year’s best books lists of Publishers Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, and Amazon.com.
Carolyn McCormick has appeared in the films A Simple Twist of Fate and Enemy Mine. She has appeared on television as Dr. Olivit in Law & Order for more than a decade and as a guest on The Practice and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Her Broadway credits include roles in The Dinner Party and Private Lives. Her audiobook narration has won her three AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Xe Sands has more than a decade of experience bringing stories to life through narration, performance, and visual art, including recordings of the Nightwalkers series from Jaquelyn Frank. She has received several honors, including AudioFile Earphones Awards and a coveted Audie Award, and she was named Favorite Debut Romance Narrator of 2011 in the Romance Audiobooks poll.
Reviews
“The concluding installment of the Southern Reach trilogy ends where the story began: in a cloud of hallucinatory mystery…This trilogy represents an interesting pivot for VanderMeer: Although sharing many of the same motifs—metamorphosis, unusual fungi, and other organic material, a pull toward the sea—it’s actually more restrained (if no less vivid) than the lush baroquerie of his earlier works. We leave knowing more about Area X than we started; we may not understand it any better, but we leave transformed, as do all travelers to that uncanny place.”
“The concluding volume of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy brings each of the series’s narrative threads together for an enigmatic but satisfying conclusion…In many ways, this is the most mysterious and puzzling book of the three: VanderMeer employs multiple flashbacks and POVs, which contribute to a multifaceted, mutating portrait of Area X. The pacing of the narrative is slower, but the reader will want to move slowly so as not to miss any of the more subtle occurrences or psychological insights. By the time the book is finished, the reader knows that this trilogy is that rare thing—a set in which the whole is as great as the parts.”
“The third volume in the Southern Reach trilogy takes us back to the region known as Area X…Easy answers are not on offer from VanderMeer, but he does give a sense of closure, and the three books together stand as a remarkable imaginative achievement. Displaying the dizzying skill with imagery and language that have been seen throughout the series, the author leaves readers with some answers, more questions, and an appreciation of the journey.”
“As the Southern Reach trilogy concludes, another exploratory team is sent into Area X—that raw, almost biologically primal region that revealed its secrets in Annihilation and Authority…A satisfying conclusion to this captivating trilogy.”
“VanderMeer weaves together otherworldly tales of the supernatural and the half-human.”
“[A] wonderfully creepy blend of horror and science fiction…Speculative fiction at its most transfixing.”
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