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Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer
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Absolution

$28.30

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Narrator Bronson Pinchot

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Length 14 hours 52 minutes
Language English
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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series―and the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

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 bestseller 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, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

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.

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.

Illustration of person sitting

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Reviews

“I‘m loving The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. Creepy and fascinating.”

“Againt all odds, Absolution is…just as good as the first three novels…it sticks to the shadows, just where the best horror belongs."

Absolution…reinforce the original series’ contention—that the boundary between the uncanny and the familiar is more porous than we realize—with the observation that sometimes, at the very heart of rationality, we may find madness.”

“As told in beautiful prose infused with bizarre and disturbing images, Area X remains as fascinating and unknowable as ever.”

“Science fiction with a gothic horror twist, this is a creepy, transfixing tale of isolation at the end of the world.”

“It makes me so happy that so many people are going to read such a spectacularly strange novel.”

“Eerie and evocative…VanderMeer’s horrifying declaration of the impossibility of knowing the other is a knockout.”

“The main theme of the trilogy was always unknowability—untrustworthy leaders, reckless wildlife, and complicated humans are his constant focus, and here he cannily balances the strangeness with the terror of confronting it.”

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