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Books cover reveals

Annihilation: Your First Look at Jeff VanderMeer’s New Southern Reach Trilogy

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Published on August 28, 2013

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux have released the cover (and a little something extra) for Annihilation, the first book in the new Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, coming on February 4, 2014!

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.

This is the twelfth expedition.

Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them, and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another, that change everything.

Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls, said, “A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unraveling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and claustrophobic dread that lingers long afterward. I loved it.”

Check out the cover, designed by Charlotte Strick and illustrated by Eric Nyquist.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer Southern Reach trilogy

Annihilation is the first volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, which will be published throughout 2014: volume two (Authority) in May, and volume three (Acceptance) in September.

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