Synopses & Reviews
The Strange Bird — from New York Times bestselling novelist Jeff VanderMeer — expands and weaves deeply into the world of his “thorough marvel” of a novel, Borne.
The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory — 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. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape.
But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The sky itself is full of wildlife that rejects her as one of their own, and also full of technology — satellites and drones and other detritus of the human civilization below that has all but destroyed itself. And 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 that have outlived the corporation itself: a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. But of the many creatures she encounters with whom she bears some kind of kinship, 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, a new chapter, to his celebrated novel Borne. He has created a whole new perspective on the world inhabited by Rachel and Wick, the Magician, Mord, and Borne — a view from above, of course, but also 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.
Review
"...[A] quiet and elegiac look at what humans do to their surroundings and the lies they tell themselves to survive." Shelf Awareness
Review
"A lyrical if dark-hearted sidenote to VanderMeer’s wonderfully inventive dystopian novel Borne...VanderMeer writes circles around most fantasists at work today." Kirkus
Review
"With hallucinatory imagery and expressive prose, this companion novella to Borne is beautiful and bleak, painful and rewarding in equal measure." Booklist (Starred Review)
About the Author
Jeff VanderMeer’s New York Times bestselling Southern Reach trilogy has been translated into over 35 languages. The first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award, was shortlisted for a half dozen more, and has been made into a movie. His novel, Borne, is the first release from Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s new MCD imprint and has received wide critical acclaim, including a rare trifecta of rave reviews from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. The novel has also been optioned by Paramount. The New Yorker has called Jeff “the weird Thoreau” and he frequently speaks about issues related to climate change and storytelling, including at DePaul, MIT, and the Guggenheim. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
Jeff VanderMeer on PowellsBooks.Blog
My latest book is
The Strange Bird, which exists in the universe of my novel
Borne. It’s my attempt to write from the perspective of a bird, although I cheat a bit since the bird is part human. The story follows the bird’s quest to be free, while encountering any number of obstacles...
Read More»