Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of the New York Times – bestselling Southern Reach trilogy. The first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award, and was made into a movie in 2018. Recent works include Dead Astronauts, Borne, and The Strange Bird. In A Peculiar Peril (The Misadventures of Jonathan Lambshead #1) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) our hero inherits his late grandfather’s overstuffed mansion —a cabinet of curiosities—once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But they soon discover that the house is filled with more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where English occultist Aleister Crowley has come back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals — and vegetables. Jonathan finds his destiny as a member of a secret society devoted to keeping our world separate from Aurora. He and his friends go deeper into a deadly pursuit of the profound evil that is also chasing after them. The New York Times Book Review praised it as “A heck of a lot of fun. . . New readers young and old will find VanderMeer’s foray into fresh territory a welcome port of entry to a wildly imaginative universe.”