
Earthlings
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Nancy Wu
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By:
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Sayaka Murata
- Amazon Editor’s Top Pick
- Bustle Pick
- Vulture.com Pick
As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. Each summer, Natsuki counts down the days until her family drives into the mountains of Nagano to visit her grandparents in their wooden house in the forest, a place that couldn’t be more different from her grey commuter town. One summer, her cousin Yuu confides to Natsuki that he is an extraterrestrial and that every night he searches the sky for the spaceship that might take him back to his home planet. Natsuki wonders if she might be an alien too.
Back in her city home, Natsuki is scolded or ignored and even preyed upon by a young teacher at her cram school. As she grows up in a hostile, violent world, she consoles herself with memories of her time with Yuu and discovers a surprisingly potent inner power. Natsuki seems forced to fit into a society she deems a “baby factory,” but even as a married woman she wonders if there is more to this world than the mundane reality everyone else seems to accept. The answers are out there, and Natsuki has the power to find them.
Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world and cements Sayaka Murata’s status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe.
©2018 Sakaya Murata (P)2020 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...




















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Two flaws: I'm gonna give a HUGE content warning because this contains some pretty graphic and harrowing depictions of CSA that kind of come out of nowhere. Luckily I have no related trauma so it "merely" unnerved me but if that's a subject you're uncomfortable with I'd either give this a pass or just be prepared that it's in here. The other flaw is probably a personal thing, but the narrator, while doing an excellent job conveying the childlike mindsets of the main characters, unfortunate chose a voice for the Yu character that sounds *exactly* like Milhouse from The Simpsons. It's honestly pretty hilarious but it did make the tone really bizarre and uncomfortable before I adjusted.
UHHHH
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NOPE. NOPE. NOPE.
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Experimental Writing
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This is crazy, disturbing, weird, and extreme!
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Bizarre, Thoughtful, and Troubling
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So messed up
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Excellent and gripping
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if they would have applied those powerful messages to the main characters to where they were able to learn and heal from the trauma would have been a better story line (that could have also incorporated murder)
Things got weird Quick
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just an amazingly weird tale
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A great (but upsetting) listen!
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