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Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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Annihilation

Southern Reach (Related to this series)

Author
Jeff VanderMeer
Narrator
Carolyn McCormick
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Publish Date
27 February 2014
Run Time
6 hours
Format
Audiobook
Genre
Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Science fiction
Rating
5.0 (2 reviews)

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What to expect

’A contemporary masterpiece’ Guardian

THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY – NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC

For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border – an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.

The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.

Now four women embark on the twelfth expedition into the unknown.

Critics Review

  • Praise for Annihilation and the Southern Reach Series:

    ‘I’m loving the Southern Reach Trilogy … Creepy and fascinating’ Stephen King, author of The Shining

    ‘Hauntingly weird and brilliantly new … These are contemporary masterpieces and career-defining novels’ Guardian

    ‘A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alike’ Sunday Telegraph

    ‘A psycho-geographical tour de force, channeling Ballard and Lovecraft to instill the reader with a deep, delicious unease’ Financial Times

    ‘Haunting … Annihilation is so disquietingly strange as to defy summarization’ Daily Mail

    ‘Shot through with echoes of Lovecraft, Orwell, and Kafka … compulsively readable’ Entertainment Weekly

    Creepy … an old-style gothic horror novel set in a not-too-distant future. The best bits turn your mind inside out’ Washington Post

    ‘[An] altogether fantastic book … Annihilation is a book meant for gulping – for going in head-first and not coming up for air until you hit the back cover’ NPR

    ‘A strikingly effective chiller with a classically Lovecraftian premise’ Los Angeles Review of Books

    ‘It's the novel's unbearable dread that lingers with me days after I've finished it’ The Paris Review

    ‘Immersive, insightful and often deeply bloody creepy, this is a startlingly good novel’ SFX Magazine

    ‘A tense and chilling psychological thriller … 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, author of Bridge

    ‘Annihilation feels akin to isolated sci-fi terrors of Alien … teases and terrifies and fascinates’ Kevin Nguyen, author of My Documents

    ‘Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent’ Warren Ellis

User Reviews

Book 5.0

Narration 3.5

  • 5.0 3.0

    One of my favourite books and wanted to listen to it to get back up to speed to read the new one.

    The narration was fine but not super compelling

    Aloy 2025-10-20

Details
Author
Jeff VanderMeer
Narrator
Carolyn McCormick
Duration
6 hours
Release Date
27 February 2014
ISBN
9780007556519
Format
Audiobook
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Genre
Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Science fiction
Rating
5.0(2 reviews)
Narration
3.5(2 reviews)

Synopsis

’A contemporary masterpiece’ Guardian THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY – NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border – an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness. The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic. Now four women embark on the twelfth expedition into the unknown.

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