THE SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY

ANNIHILATION

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014, reissued 2018, $19.26, Books Kinokuniya

An expedition of four women - a biologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist and their leader, a psychologist - cross the border into an abandoned coastal zone called Area X in which everything seems to be mutating.

All previous expeditions have gone horribly wrong. Members have vanished, killed one another or returned irrevocably changed. The biologist's husband, who was on the last expedition, died of cancer shortly after his return.

Nothing is as it seems in Area X and soon the team must contend with not just its deadly flora and fauna, but also one another.

AUTHORITY

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014, $24.80, Books Kinokuniya

A man who calls himself Control assumes leadership of the Southern Reach, the secret agency sending expeditions into Area X. He tries to interrogate the biologist who has returned from the expedition, but she refuses to speak of it and refers to herself as Ghost Bird. Area X continues to expand.

ACCEPTANCE

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014, $24.42, Books Kinokuniya

The third novel tells, in a non-linear fashion, the story of the lighthouse keeper who lived on the coastline before it became Area X; how the psychologist came to join the Southern Reach and became its director; and Control and Ghost Bird's journey through Area X.

BORNE

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017, $43.57, Books Kinokuniya

In a city brought to ruin by the enigmatic Company, survivors live off salvage while trying to elude Mord, a murderous flying bear some five storeys high. In the fur of a sleeping Mord, a scavenger called Rachel finds a mysterious sea anemone-like creature she names Borne, with whom she forms a mother-child relationship, even as the city around them grows more dangerous by the day.

THE STRANGE BIRD

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018, $16.95, Books Kinokuniya

A novella set in the Borne universe about a part-bird, part-human experiment that escapes the Company's labs.