Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

Finch

A Novel

Jeff VanderMeer

Picador

opens in a new window
opens in a new window Finch Download image

ISBN10: 0374538611
ISBN13: 9780374538613

Trade Paperback

416 Pages

$18.00

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

In a deserted tenement in an occupied city, two dead bodies lie on a dusty floor as if they have fallen out of the air. One corpse is cut in half, the other is utterly unmarked. One is human, the other isn’t. The city of Ambergris is half ruined, rotten, its population controlled by narcotics, internment camps, and acts of terror. But its new masters want this case closed, urgently. Detective John Finch has just one week to solve it or be sent to the camps. With no ID for the victims, no clues, no leads, and precious little hope, Finch’s fate hangs in the balance.

But there is more to this case than meets the eye. Enough to put Finch in the crosshairs of every spy, rebel, informer, and traitor in town. Under the shadow of the eldrich tower the occupiers are raising above the city, Finch is about to come face-to-face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever. Why does one of the victims most resemble a man thought to have been dead for a hundred years? What is the murders’ connection to an attempted genocide nearly six hundred years ago? And just what is the secret purpose of the occupiers’ tower?

Reviews

Praise for Finch

"Finch is a compelling experience, a fungalpunk nightmare pullulating with dark, phantasmagorical transformations: it works equally as a stylish detective story, a perverse example of the New Weird fantasy subgenre, and an effective metaphor for the dehumanising effects of occupying forces and totalitarian regimes."—The Guardian

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

MONDAY


Interrogator: What did you see then?

Finch: Nothing. I couldn’t see anything.

I: Wrong answer.

[howls and screams and sobbing]

I: Had you ever met the Lady in Blue before?

F: No, but...

About the author

Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels (Borne, Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Acceptance, and Authority), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, on the edge of a ravine, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cat, Neo.

Ditte Valente

Read Author Interview