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Powell's Picks of the Month Hot new releases and under-the-radar gems for adults and kids.

Staff Top Fives 2017 Our favorite books of the year.

Staff Pick

Relations between technology and humans are tackled in a bizarre and post-apocalyptic world in Jeff VanderMeer's Borne. Readers familiar with VanderMeer's unique psychedelic style will find a familiar sense of awe in the intricacy of his newly imagined world. To those unfamiliar with VanderMeer, Borne is a great and gruesome introduction. All readers will finish this sci-fi novel mystified and hungry for more. Recommended By Alex Y., Powells.com

Jeff VanderMeer's Borne is an astonishingly beautiful book about relationships, survival, and attachment in a world racked by climate change and flooded with refugees. Set in a ruined, post-apocalyptic city which has been decimated by the “Company” and its biotech creations, it's one of the most moving and intensely human books I've read this year. It also includes a gigantic, lethal flying bear named Mord. As he demonstrated in his earlier work, VanderMeer is remarkable at crossing genre lines to create gorgeously literary speculative fiction, or surreally beautiful sci-fi. Recommended By Jill O., Powells.com

Jeff VanderMeer has blown my socks off in the past with stories that expand sci-fi into brave new biological realms while challenging our stuffy notions about utopias and dystopias. With Borne he's outdone himself, throwing us into a place as utterly bizarre as it is convincing. A giant bear floats in the sky and is worshiped by some as a god; the mysterious and menacing specter of the Company looms; and a scavenger finds and adopts a strange sentient blob that learns to talk. Beneath all of these threads is a story that is as old as time: the love between mother and child. It's just that this time the child may or may not be a bioweapon that could change life as we know it. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com

Borne has all of the lush savagery of VanderMeer's excellent Southern Reach trilogy, but with an added humanity and optimism that kept me rapt during the novel's more brutal and stranger moments. VanderMeer is gifted at creating unique biological environments, populated by creatures and plants that both reflect the human condition and express abilities and knowledge far beyond human limitations. It is in such a place, a ruined, perilous city, that a scavenger named Rachel meets a "child" named Borne. Their relationship is at the heart of this absorbing novel, which is ultimately about how to define personhood in a post-human world. Recommended By Rhianna W., Powells.com