The Strange Bird
The Strange Bird – from Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation – expands and weaves deeply into the world of his ‘thorough marvel’ (Colson Whitehead) of a novel, Borne.
The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature – she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations.
But, even if she escapes, she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful: a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. But of the many creatures she encounters, it is the humans – all of them now simply scrambling to survive – who are the most insidious, who still see her as simply something to possess, to capture, to trade, to exploit. Never to understand, never to welcome home.
With The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer has done more than add another layer to his celebrated novel Borne. He has created a fresh perspective on the world inhabited by Rachel, Wick and Borne – a view from deep inside the mind of a new kind of creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.
Praise for Borne: -
”'Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy was an ever-creeping map of the apocalypse; with Borne he continues his investigation into the malevolent grace of the world, and it's a thorough marvel” - Colson Whitehead
”'Jeff VanderMeer’s deeply strange and brilliant new novel extends the meditation on the central question of non-human sentience in his earlier work … No one writes a post-apocalyptic landscape like VanderMeer, so detailed and strange in all its lineaments and topography” - Neel Mukherjee, Guardian
”'As Borne grows and evolves, so develops a weird family dynamic in a novel that is as much of a fascinating hybrid as its title character, both an enthralling fantasy adventure and a bleak eco-dystopic admonition” - James Lovegrove, Financial Times
”'From being a very successful SF writer, VanderMeer will become mainstream - and Borne is full of signs that he is already thinking ahead of that easy transition, and perhaps subverting it” - Toby Litt for New Statesman
”'Borne is a fantastic read, a vivid vision of an apocalyptic future that defies expectations and challenges any preconceptions as to how events are going to unfold. It can be disturbing at times - there are some chilling moments that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror novel - but it’s a book that ultimately transcends genre, offering its reader a range of emotions and a finale that provides more than one twist, all of which should be applauded. Rachel’s story is one that will stay in the memory for a long time; VanderMeer shares her hopes and dreams with us, as well as her failures and concerns, making Borne an intimate portrayal that appeals on a multitude of levels” - Starburst
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