Ultimately, the fate of Ambergris comes to lie in the hands of John Finch, a beleaguered detective with a murder on to solve and too many loyalties for one man to bear. There are stories within stories, mystery, mayhem, and a dark history that threatens to consume the city itself as the gray caps, the mysterious and deadly mushroom people who once ruled Ambergris and have since been driven underground, now threaten to rise again. Ambergris bristles with intellectual fervor and religious rivalries it thrives on cultural upheaval, and its politics are never short on intrigue, conspiracy, and even terror. More than twenty years ago, Jeff VanderMeer first introduced the world to the fictional city of Ambergris, a beautiful and sinister sprawling metropolis populated by artists and thieves, composers and murderers, geniuses and madmen. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding.From the author of Borne and Annihilation comes the one-volume hardcover reissue of his cult classic Ambergris Trilogy. By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and 'eyewitness' reports invokes a universe within a puzzle box where you can lose-and find-yourself again.Ībout the Author Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels ( Borne, Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy ( Annihilation, Acceptance, and Authority), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced that he's made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he's really from a place called Chicago.

An artist receives an invitation to a beheading-and finds himself enchanted. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye.

And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In this reinvention of the literature of the fantastic, you hold in your hands an invitation to a place unlike any you've ever visited-an invitation delivered by one of our most audacious and astonishing literary magicians. About the Book Originally published in 2002 by Prime Books.įrom Jeff VanderMeer, the author of Borne and Annihilation, comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic City of Saints and Madmen.

Ambergris jeff vandermeer