A single-volume hardcover edition that brings together the three volumes of the Southern Reach Trilogy, which were originally published as paperback originals in February, May, and September 2014.
The mysteries of Area X may have been solved, but.
As they press deeper into the unknown-navigating new terrain and new challenges-the threat to the outside world becomes more daunting.
A new team embarks across the border on a mission to find a member of a previous expedition who may have been left behind.
It is winter in Area X in Acceptance.
And the consequences will spread much further than that.
From a series of interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, the secrets of Area X begin to reveal themselves-and what they expose pushes Control to confront disturbing truths about both himself and the agency he\'s promised to serve.
In Authority, John Rodriguez, aka Control, is the team\'s newly appointed head.
After the disastrous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the Southern Reach-the secret agency that monitors these expeditions-is in disarray.
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.
Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist.
This is the twelfth expedition.
The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died 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 months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.
Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization.
Area X-a remote and lush terrain-has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades.
Annihilation is the first volume in Jeff VanderMeer\'s Southern Reach trilogy, Authority is the second, and Acceptance is the third.
A single-volume hardcover edition that brings together the three volumes of the Southern Reach Trilogy, which were originally published as paperback originals in February, May, and September 2014
