Hummingbird Salamander
by Jeff Vandermeer
What if the world ended, not with a whimper, but with the stilling of a bird’s wing?
In Hummingbird Salamander, a thriller that takes place ten seconds into the future, New York Times bestselling, World Fantasy Award-winning author Jeff VanderMeer turns his prodigious imagination to the project of posing that question across pages that are part spy drama, part eco-thriller, and all VanderMeer. Using the intimate knowledge of ecology he evinced in the Area X novels, VanderMeer here layers in incidents of high drama and truly disturbing possibility in language that is simultaneously clear and poetic, forceful and subtle.
The protagonist of Hummingbird Salamander, who protects herself—or tries to—behind the pseudonym “Jane Smith,” is a security agent who is thrust into a mystery when a barista hands her an envelope of mysterious provenance. She does what most of us would do. She opens it.
In the envelope is a key and an address, and when she visits the location she finds a locked storage room containing one puzzling item—a hummingbird preserved by taxidermy. From there, Jane follows each successive clue like a chain forging itself link by link, leading to secrets far bigger than she could have conceived. These secrets could spell the end of the world.
VanderMeer is at his best in this page-turning thriller that asks deep questions about climate change, the world we live in, and who we are.
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What if the world ended, not with a whimper, but with the stilling of a bird’s wing? In Hummingbird Salamander, a thriller that takes place ten seconds into the future, New York Times bestselling, World Fantasy Award-winning author Jeff VanderMeer turns his prodigious imagination to the project of posing that question across pages that are part spy drama, part eco-thriller, and all VanderMeer. Using the intimate knowledge of ecology he evinced in the Area X novels, VanderMeer here layers in incidents of high drama and truly disturbing possibility in language that is simultaneously clear and poetic, forceful and subtle. The protagonist of Hummingbird Salamander, who protects herself—or tries to—behind the pseudonym “Jane Smith,” is a security agent who is thrust into a mystery when a barista hands her an envelope of mysterious provenance. She does what most of us would do. She opens it. In the envelope is a key and an address, and when she visits the location she finds a locked storage room containing one puzzling item—a hummingbird preserved by taxidermy. From there, Jane follows each successive clue like a chain forging itself link by link, leading to secrets far bigger than she could have conceived. These secrets could spell the end of the world. VanderMeer is at his best in this page-turning thriller that asks deep questions about climate change, the world we live in, and who we are.