Absolution, 9780008725990
Paperback
Area X’s untold secrets revealed: A final, terrifying plunge awaits.

Absolution

$32.87

  • Paperback

    480 pages

  • Release Date

    9 March 2026

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Summary

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, the surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s blockbuster Southern Reach Trilogy.

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 …

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780008725990
ISBN-10:0008725993
Author:Jeff VanderMeer
Publisher:HarperCollins Publishers
Imprint:Fourth Estate Ltd
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:480
Release Date:9 March 2026
Weight:320g
Dimensions:198mm x 129mm x 34mm
What They're Saying

Critics Review

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

‘Unsettling and unputdownable like a good old-fashioned adventure story, only weirder, beautifully written and not at all old-fashioned’ Karen Joy Fowler, Bookpage

This trilogy is a modern mycological masterpiece … Remarkable … Tense, eerie and unsettling … Genuinely potent and dream-haunting writing. VanderMeer has arrived’ Guardian

‘An ever-creeping map of the apocalypse’ Colson Whitehead

‘Revelatory, terrifying and marvellous’ Helen MacDonald

‘A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alikeSunday Telegraph

‘A lasting monument to the uncanny … You find yourself afraid to turn the pageGuardian

‘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

‘The payoff is absolutely worth the patience’ N. K. Jemisin, The New York Times Book Review

‘So disquietingly strange as to defy summarisation. Read itDaily Mail

Astonishing, frightening, spectacular … 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

About The Author

Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and in multiple year’s-best anthologies. He writes non-fiction for the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife.

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