Titles in this Set: 1. Annihilation2. Authority3. Acceptance4. Absolution Description: AnnihilationFor 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. AuthorityAfter thirty years, the secret government agency known as the Southern Reach has been unable to solve the mysteries of Area X, a seemingly malevolent landscape wiped clean of human civilisation. Or is “pristine wilderness” a better description? Expedition after expedition has failed to come up with answers, often disastrously. The Southern Reach, in the process, has become a backwater agency, forgotten and underfunded despite the urgency of its mission. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray. Enter John Rodriguez (aka “Control”), the Southern Reach’s newly appointed director. Working with a distrustful team desperate for success, Control must navigate a maze of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage. What does it all mean? Can he reach some kind of understanding before it’s too late? In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Series, many of Area X’s most disturbing questions are answered … but the answers are far from reassuring. AcceptanceArea X has rebuffed expedition after expedition for decades, refusing to reveal its secrets. As it expands alarmingly, the Southern Reach agency tasked with its investigation has collapsed in confusion. Now, one last, desperate team crosses the border, determined to reach a remote island that may yet hold vital answers. How was Area X created, and why? Can it be stopped? In this climactic volume of the Southern Reach trilogy, reality mutates and mysteries resolve, but now that so many questions have answers, the consequences are no less profound – or terrifying. AbsolutionWhen 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 bestsellers 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, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.