Recommendations from our site
“Annihilation itself is very short, and intense and creepy and beautiful. We follow four women on an expedition into Area X: the anthropologist, the psychologist, the surveyor, and our protagonist the biologist. We don’t know names, or much more about Area X; we are told very early that two of the band especially don’t need to be named, as they will die imminently. This is the whole tone of the novel – sparse, tense, mysterious. For all that, the descriptions are incredibly evocative.” Read more...
“The Southern Reach is a research institution set up to investigate the mysterious ‘Area X’, an exclusion zone with strange and frightening effects on the human mind. We follow ‘the biologist’, one member of a four-woman team that has been dispatched into the zone. Long abandoned and fenced off, it has grown into a pristine wilderness – but it is haunted by traces of the expeditions that have gone before them. I can’t tell you how eerie and absorbing it is.” Read more...
The best books on Abandoned Places
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“In the introduction to The Weird, the 2011 anthology that Jeff Vandermeer and his wife Ann edited, they suggest the weird isn’t a genre or a form so much as a technique or an affect, a thing that lurks in the interstices, and which emerges in unexpected and unsettling ways. I rather love this idea, not least because it captures something of what makes both Annihilation and its two sequels, Authority and Acceptance, so compelling, the way reading them leaves you feeling like you’ve been colonised yourself, your brain permanently altered by your descent into the world of the books.” Read more...
The Best Climate Change Novels
James Bradley, Novelist
“A colleague of mine, Roy Scranton, knows Jeff VanderMeer and brought him to Notre Dame a few weeks ago for a reading. Way in advance, Roy said, ‘Laura, you’re going to love this guy, he’s the weird Thoreau.’” Read more...
The Best Henry David Thoreau Books
Laura Dassow Walls, Biographer
“Annihilation evokes two things very well: that sense of confusion and powerlessness, and the drive to exert some sort of control over the situation by exploring and learning.” Read more...
The best books on Climate Change and Uncertainty
Kate Marvel, Scientist
“I like that Annihilation is set on a planet that’s very recognizably Earth, but also frighteningly different. We may not all turn into monsters, but I suspect the future might be weirder than we realise.”
The best books on Climate Change and Uncertainty
Kate Marvel, Scientist
