ACCEPTANCE
JEFF VANDERMEER
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London, SE1 9GF, UK
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014
Copyright © VanderMeer Creative, Inc. 2014
Jeff VanderMeer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007553532
Ebook edition © September 2014 ISBN: 9780007553549
Version: 2017-11-28
Praise for the Southern Reach Trilogy
‘A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unravelling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot of Lovecraft, [Annihilation] builds with an unbearable tension and claustrophobic dread that lingers long afterwards’
Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls
‘A lasting monument to the uncanny … you find yourself afraid to turn the page’
Simon Ings, Guardian
‘VanderMeer’s novel is a psycho-geographical tour de force, channelling Ballard and Lovecraft to instil the reader with a deep, delicious unease’
James Lovegrove, Financial Times
‘Immersive, insightful and often deeply bloody creepy, this is a startlingly good novel … the Southern Reach series will be a major work’
Will Salmon, SFX Magazine
‘A clear triumph for VanderMeer … a compelling, elegant and existential story of far broader appeal … A novel whose world is built seamlessly and whose symbols are rich and dark’
Lydia Millet, LA Times
‘A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alike … The writing itself has a clarity that makes the abundancy of the setting more powerful’
Paul Kincaid, Sunday Telegraph
‘What a haunting book this is, lodging deep in the memory … So disquietingly strange as to defy summarisation. Read it’
Ned Denny, Daily Mail
‘The incidents pile up, building in tension and terror … More than just a horror novel; there’s something Poe-like in this tightening, increasingly paranoid focus … Cruel and exquisite’
N. K. Jemisin, New York Times
For Ann
Table of Contents
Praise for the Southern Reach Trilogy
000X: The Director, Twelfth Expedition
05: The Seeker & Surveillance Bandits