Jeff VanderMeer

’Frankly superb. This pummelling eco-thriller camouflages the true ‘understory’ of societal collapse, and glows in the dark with original thinking’ David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue A speculative thriller about the end of all things, set in the Pacific Northwest. A harrowing descent into a secret world.

Hummingbird Salamander

Emiley Jones

I stared out the window as he began to tell me everything he knew about computers. I could tell his greatest need, or mine, was to sit alone in a park for an hour and be as silent as a stone.

The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you're young. There's a winnowing away and a shutting down. A sense of something having been taken from you and you don't know exactly what it is, just that it isn't there anymore. What opens up to you instead is experience, is cunning, is foreknowledge. Nothing you sought.

To many, they were not bad people, not even close. Pillars of the community. They believed in the future. They believed they were contributing to the future even as they took the future away.

Consumed by the fire, you might rise as a phoenix. Or you might just be a pile of crumbling ashes.

Hummingbird Salamander quotes

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