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Borne - Paperback
$17.49
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Borne
$17.49
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Is this book for you?
- Feels
- Mind-bending, Melancholy, Hopeful
- Kind of story
- Weird fiction, Post-apocalyptic, Literary science fiction
- About
- Found family, Identity, Survival, Technology
- Pace
- Steady
- How dark
- 3 of 5. Dark, with real menace
- Romance
- A subplot
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Featured in our reading guide: Where to Start with Jeff VanderMeer
Rachel finds him on the flank of a giant flying bear. He is the size of a fist, green, and she decides to keep him.
Shelf note: The strangest love story on our shelves, and one of the kindest.
The city has no name and no government. It has the Company, mostly ruined, still leaking biotech into the streets, and it has Mord, a bear the size of a building who sleeps in the sky and wakes to destroy things. Rachel scavenges from his fur. It's one of the few reliable jobs left.
What she brings home that day looks like a sea anemone and tastes the air. She names him Borne. He learns to talk. He grows. He starts asking whether he is a person or a weapon, and Rachel discovers she does not have a good answer.
VanderMeer writes ecological collapse with more tenderness than most authors bring to a love story. Borne's education, his jokes, his shapeshifting, his terrible hunger, is genuinely charming right up to the moment it isn't. Named one of the best books of 2017 by the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and others.
Details
- Author: Jeff VanderMeer
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 9780374537654
- Genre: Literary science fiction, dystopian, weird fiction
Praise
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Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy was an ever-creeping map of the apocalypse; with Borne he continues his investigation into the malevolent grace of the world, and it's a thorough marvel.
Colson Whitehead
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VanderMeer is that rare novelist who turns to nonhumans not to make them approximate us as much as possible but to make such approximation impossible. All of this is magnified a hundredfold in Borne...
Wai Chee Dimock, The New York Times Book Review
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The conceptual elements in VanderMeer's fiction are so striking that the firmness with which he cinches them to his characters' lives is often overlooked... Borne is VanderMeer's trans-species rumination on the theme of parenting...
Laura Miller, The New Yorker
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Borne, the latest novel from New Weird author Jeff VanderMeer, is a story of loving self-sacrifice, hallucinatory beauty, and poisonous trust... Heady delights only add to the engrossing richness of Borne.
Nisi Shawl, The Washington Post
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