One thing I didn't foresee happening this year was that we would get a new entry in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series. But the author announced exactly that in April, and since then I've been counting the days until the book's release. AbsolutionThe fourth novel in what was previously a trilogy, hits shelves this week and takes us back to the beginning of Area x and the ill-fated first expeditions to explore it.
For the uninitiated, the series is about a strange coastal region of the US that has inexplicably become isolated behind an invisible border and returned to a state of wilderness. A shady government agency has been tasked with studying it, but the people who undertake those exploratory missions never return or return. different. The series includes Annihilation (which inspired the 2018 film starring Natalie Portman), Authority and Acceptance.
Ten years after the series' original release, a prequel seems like the perfect way to delve back into the mysteries of Area x and the Southern Reach. The trilogy concluded in a way that answered some questions but also left much more up in the air. And although you probably shouldn't wait Absolution To summarize everything neatly, it gives us more information about the early days of the anomaly and the perspective of key characters in that timeline, like Lowry. Absolution It is heavy: it is structured so that there are three parts similar to a novella and it is almost 500 pages in total. Which is great, because I can't get enough of Area x.
