Absolution with Jeff VanderMeer
Tue 05 Nov 2024
7:00pm at Bath Elim Church, Charlotte St, Bath BA1 2ND
Book + Ticket gives you a free ticket with a copy of the book, all tickets include 15% off any books purchased on the night, author talk, Q&A and signing.
Other ways to book:
Email books@mrbsemporium.com, call 01225 331155 or pop into the shop at 14-15 John Street, Bath. BA1 2JL.
We are delighted to announce that Jeff VanderMeer, author of the blockbuster Annihilation, joins us to discuss the surprise fourth volume in the Southern Reach Trilogy, Absolution.
We last welcomed Jeff to Mr B’s in 2014 after our team became completely obsessed with all three books in the trilogy. We are honoured to now welcome Jeff back for his first UK tour in ten years!
The New York Times–bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy has been translated into more than thirty-seven languages. The first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula and the Shirley Jackson Awards, and was turned into a hit Netflix movie by Alex Garland and starring Natalie Portman. It was soon followed by Authority, and Acceptance, and now the spectacular Absolution. His other books include Hummingbird Salamander, Dead Astronauts, and Borne (in development as a TV series at AMC).
About the book:
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 bestsellers 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, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.
Praise for 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
‘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
