Borne

Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2018

The dark, dangerous, funny and beautifully strange new novel from the author of Annihilation, the inspiration for the major motion picture, adapted and directed by Alex Garland. Neither of us had control of our monsters anymore.

In a ruined city of the future, in a world laid to ashes by a dominant biotech company known simply as ‘Company’, a woman scavenges a strange hybrid creature from the fur of a despotic, flying bear known as Mord.

She names him Borne.

Gradually Rachel bonds with Borne, who reminds her of her homeland lost to rising seas. And as she attempts to learn more about him, Borne begins to grow and change, acquiring new language and mimicking the world around him

But Rachel’s lover Wick sees Borne as nothing but a threat and - intent on rendering him down as raw material for the special drugs he sells – he sets about undermining Borne’s new burgeoning development.

But in this brave new world of new-born sentience, nothing is quite what it seems, and if Wick is hiding secrets, so too is Rachel - and Borne most of all.

A Frankenstein for a new age, Borne is a tantalisingly daring glimpse into intelligence beyond human understanding. Hot on the heels of his bestselling Southern Reach trilogy, Vandermeer delivers a deeply strange, luminously brilliant exploration of metamorphosis in a world of endless possibility.

Read X Marks the Plot, our exclusive interview with Jeff VanderMeer, on the Waterstones Blog