Ambergris

Between these covers, the cult classic works of Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris offer readers a tour de force of language and imagination. In a rich and heady mix of arcane words and unforgettable images, fantastic characters and startling events—in the collection, City of Saints and Madmen, and the novels, Shriek: an Afterword, and Finch—test, then shatter the limits of what speculative fiction can do.

The title city is a place of vivid, terrible beauty, exhibiting sophisticated cruelties and dangers experienced as something approaching art. Following, an afterword as epic, where secrets and obsessions play out on streets above a rising force of a people unlike any other in fantasy fiction. And finally, in an Ambergris conquered and enslaved, a desperate man seeks the answers to both a crime that may be unsolvable and the troubling mystery of the future of the city itself.

Jeff VanderMeer exhibits his masterful control over chaos and his unparalleled ability to render the bizarre and terrifying as things of beauty. Objects of desire simultaneously promise exaltation and damnation, and startlingly real people play out their fascinating lives in their fascinating city.

Widely recognized as one of the finest practitioners of the fantastic in contemporary fiction, VanderMeer is a three-time recipient of the World Fantasy Award, including one for “The Transformation of Martin Lake,” which forms part of the Ambergris saga presented here. His work found a wider readership with the publication of the Area X novels, and Annihilation was adapted into a major motion picture. But, here, in Ambergris, his boundless imagination is already on full display. Return to where it all began: the city of Ambergris.