A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND
OSCAR ISAAC
**
The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula
Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers
exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque
nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson).**
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades.
Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first
expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the
second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail
of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the
eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and
within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first
volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth
expedition.
The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a
psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their
mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their
surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being
contaminated by Area X itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers--they discover
a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass
understanding--but it's the surprises that came across the border with
them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another
that change everything.
