'VanderMeer delights in propelling the narrative forward while leaving the characters and the reader off-balance. Gabino Iglesias, San Francisco Chronicle At once enigmatic and fast, obscure and brilliant, Hummingbird Salamander celebrates nature while inviting us to contemplate the effects of contamination, pandemics and other crises, and how none of them make us “even blink anymore.” 'In Hummingbird Salamander, VanderMeer enters the realm of crime, noir and mysteries while retaining his signature topics of environmentalism, climate change and shifting identities and realities. In fact, our doughty and frankly terrifying heroine, ‘Jane Smith,’ might be the Oedipa Maas the 21st century needs.” 'Now from this daring and ever-shifting author comes Hummingbird Salamander, a volume more naturalistic, more like a traditional thriller than its predecessors, but one that also features hooks into the literary novel of paranoid conspiracy, a genre best exemplified by Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. 'This is climate fiction at its most urgent and gripping.” Hummingbird Salamander is Jeff VanderMeer at his dazzling, cinematic best, wrapping profound questions into a tightly plotted tale of the fight to survive. The threats come from all around, and time is running out-for Jane and possibly for the world. Profiteering wildlife smugglers an amoral energy company an extremist’s apocalyptic vision. She was, Jane learns, a reputed ecoterrorist. The author of the mysterious note-Jane’s only real lead-is already dead. She is being followed, her home surveilled, her family in peril. Jane has set in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control. The key leads her to a pair of taxidermied animals, a hummingbird and a salamander, which turn out to be two of the most endangered creatures on earth. “Jane Smith”-not her real name-receives an envelope that contains a note from a woman she doesn’t know and a key to an anonymous storage unit. From the author of Annihilation, a brilliant speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the possible end of all things.

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