Description

‘Astonishing, frightening, spectacular’
NEW STATESMAN

‘A lasting monument to the uncanny’
GUARDIAN

‘Chilling’
NEW YORK TIMES

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

With an introduction by N. K. Jemisin

After thirty years, the secret government agency known as the Southern Reach has been unable to solve the mysteries of Area X, a seemingly malevolent landscape wiped clean of human civilisation. Or is “pristine wilderness” a better description? Expedition after expedition has failed to come up with answers, often disastrously. The Southern Reach, in the process, has become a backwater agency, forgotten and underfunded despite the urgency of its mission. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.

Enter John Rodriguez (aka “Control”), the Southern Reach’s newly appointed director. Working with a distrustful team desperate for success, Control must navigate a maze of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage. What does it all mean? Can he reach some kind of understanding before it’s too late?

In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, many of Area X’s most disturbing questions are answered … but the answers are far from reassuring.

‘Very, very scary!’
WIRED

‘Extraordinary’
SLATE

‘Successfully creepy’
WASHINGTON POST

Publisher Review

Praise for ANNIHILATION and the SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY:

‘I’m loving the Southern Reach Trilogy … Creepy and fascinating’ Stephen King

‘Hauntingly weird and brilliantly new … These are contemporary masterpieces and career-defining novels’ Adam Robert, Books of the Year, Guardian

‘This trilogy is a modern mycological masterpiece … Remarkable … Tense, eerie and unsettling … VanderMeer writes much better prose than Poe ever did … This is genuinely potent and dream-haunting writing. VanderMeer has arrived.’ Guardian

‘A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alike … “Annihilation” shows signs of being the novel that will allow VanderMeer to break through to a new and larger audience’ Sunday Telegraph

‘A lasting monument to the uncanny … You find yourself afraid to turn the page’ Guardian

‘VanderMeer’s novel is a psycho-geographical tour de force, channelling Ballard and Lovecraft to instil the reader with a deep, delicious unease’ Financial Times

‘What a haunting book this is, lodging deep in the memory in similar fashion to otherworldly classics such as David Lindsay’s “A Voyage To Arcturus” … “Annihilation” is so disquietingly strange as to defy summarisation. Read it’ Daily Mail

‘Astonishing, frightening, spectacular … The imaginative daring and reach with which VanderMeer has invented and executed a concept such as Area X is breathtaking … Powerful and echoing … I hope the trilogy will come to be seen not only as the instant sci-fi classic it is, but also as Literature’ New Statesman

‘Immersive, insightful and often deeply bloody creepy, this is a startlingly good novel … A major work’ ***** SFX Magazine

‘A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unravelling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot of Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and claustrophobic dread that lingers long afterwards. I loved it’ Lauren Beukes

‘Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent’ Warren Ellis