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Narrated by:
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Robert Wu
About this listen
An essential masterwork from Chinese literary giant Lu Yao - winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize - available for the first time in English.
Lu Yao published only two novels before his untimely death - but their extraordinary influence catapulted the author to the top tier of Chinese contemporary fiction, establishing him as one of the most widely read and respected figures in Chinese literature.
In this first-ever translation of Lu Yao’s Life, we meet Gao Jialin, a stubborn, idealistic, and ambitious young man from a small country village whose life is upended when corrupt local politics cost him his beloved job as a schoolteacher, prompting him to reject rural life and try to make it in the big city. Against the vivid, gritty backdrop of 1980s China, Lu Yao traces the proud and passionate Gao Jialin’s difficult path to professional, romantic, and personal fulfillment - or at least hard-won acceptance.
With the emotional acuity and narrative mastery that secured his reputation as one of China’s great novelists, Lu Yao paints a vivid, emotional, and unsparing portrait of contemporary Chinese life, seen through the eyes of a working-class man who refuses to be broken.
©1982 Lu Yao (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Translation © 2019 by Chloe Estep.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that turns her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the willful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father's court. These two women's lives converge as infighting among Wurche's people threatens the region, during the height of the slave trade at the end of the nineteenth century. The Hundred Wells of Salaga offers a remarkable view of slavery and how the scramble for Africa affected the lives of everyday people.
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The Accusation
- Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea
- By: Bandi
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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The Accusation is a deeply moving and eye-opening work of fiction that paints a powerful portrait of life under the North Korean regime. Set during the period of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il's leadership, the seven stories that make up The Accusation give voice to people living under this most bizarre and horrifying of dictatorships. The characters of these compelling stories come from a wide variety of backgrounds.
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Incredibly powerful
- By Margaret on 09-30-19
By: Bandi
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When the Moon Is Low
- A Novel
- By: Nadia Hashimi
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan, Neil Shah
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Mahmoud’s passion for his wife, Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister’s family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness.
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Good story. Poor ending
- By Janine on 01-14-22
By: Nadia Hashimi
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The Girl from the Train
- By: Irma Joubert
- Narrated by: Sarah Zimmerman
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Six-year-old Gretl Schmidt is on a train bound for Auschwitz. Jakób Kowalski is planting a bomb on the tracks. As World War II draws to a close, Jakób fights with the Polish resistance against the crushing forces of Germany and Russia. They mean to destroy a German troop transport, but Gretl's unscheduled train reaches the bomb first. Gretl is the only survivor.
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Excellent story covering the middle of the 20th C.
- By john on 04-12-16
By: Irma Joubert
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The Samurai's Garden
- A Novel
- By: Gail Tsukiyama
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for her unusual story about a 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight.
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A Novel Painted with a Master's Brush
- By Bay Area Califa on 06-25-18
By: Gail Tsukiyama
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The Women in the Castle
- By: Jessica Shattuck
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined - an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times notable book The Hazards of Good Breeding.
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Skating On The Thin Ice Of Life
- By Sara on 04-29-17
By: Jessica Shattuck
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All the Lives We Never Lived
- By: Anuradha Roy
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter, The Folded Earth, and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present day about a son’s quest to uncover the truth about his mother....
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Beautiful book
- By Sonia S. on 12-13-19
By: Anuradha Roy
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
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Women of the Silk
- A Novel
- By: Gail Tsukiyama
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In Women of the Silk, Gail Tsukiyama takes listeners back to rural China in 1926, where a group of women forge a sisterhood amid the reeling machines that reverberate and clamor in a vast silk factory from dawn to dusk. Leading the first strike the village has ever seen, the young women use the strength of their ambition, dreams, and friendship to achieve the freedom they could never have hoped for on their own.
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Another beautiful historical fiction!
- By T. Hoyt on 09-28-24
By: Gail Tsukiyama
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Green City in the Sun
- By: Barbara Wood
- Narrated by: Edie Tusor
- Length: 27 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1917 Dr. Grace Treverton arrives in Kenya determined to bring modern medicine to the African natives. Her brother, Sir Valentine Treverton, has his own dream for the British protectorate: to establish an agricultural empire to rival any in England. The aspirations of the wealthy Trevertons collide with those of the Mathenge tribe, an African family that has lived on the land for years. Grace soon finds a deadly rival in Mama Wachera, an African medicine woman who fights to maintain native traditions against the encroaching whites.
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Beautifully written
- By nancy wanty on 12-18-23
By: Barbara Wood
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Under the Same Sky
- From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America
- By: Joseph Kim, Stephan Talty
- Narrated by: Raymond Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A searing story of starvation and survival in North Korea, followed by a dramatic escape, rescue by activists and Christian missionaries, and success in the United States thanks to newfound faith and courage.
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Tugs at the heart strings
- By R3v13w3r on 07-15-15
By: Joseph Kim, and others
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Honor
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marno, Piter Marik
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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An honor killing shatters and transforms the lives of Turkish immigrants in 1970s London. Internationally best-selling Turkish author Elif Shafak’s new novel is a dramatic tale of families, love, and misunderstandings that follows the destinies of twin sisters born in a Kurdish village. While Jamila stays to become a midwife, Pembe follows her Turkish husband, Adem, to London, where they hope to make new lives for themselves and their children. In London, they face a choice: stay loyal to the old traditions or try their best to fit in.
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Complex but Compelling
- By Cariola on 04-14-13
By: Elif Shafak
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Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
What listeners say about Life
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Andrew M.
- 03-04-21
Hidden Gem
I don't normally review audiobooks but I just finished Life by Lu Yao and I thought it was really something special. You get to see a drastically different way of life than most of us are used to, but on the other hand the problems of the characters are very much universal and easy to relate to.
I found the narrator Robert Wu to be excellent. At first the tonal Mandarin pronunciation of names was a bit off-putting, but I came to appreciate it. It gives the work a very unique feel. It's true some of the voices are a bit cartoony, but that does a good job of making each character feel unique. And the narrator is still able to convey a great deal of emotion in the characters' words. A few of the scenes were absolutely heart-wrenching and brought tears to my eyes.
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- david h
- 07-10-21
Terrible performance of a 5-stsr story
Audible should replace this version of Lu Yao's excellent story about the life and loves of Gao Jia Ling. The text juxtaposes the evolution of Jia Ling's romantic triangle with that of the lives of rural peasants in any valley of China's mountains south of, say, Hebei. As the former brigade system imposed by the Party under Mao opens up, bringing new opportunities for mobility and also corrupt nepotism, educated villagers like Jia Ling are faced with new possibilities. Unfortunately Jia Ling falls victim to petty jealousy and at the end of the book is left facing a life of labour.
Enjoyment of this audiobook is destroyed by Robert Wu's awful characterizations and unnecessary imposition of Chinese tones on the names of all characters. Very distracting and very annoying.
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- Vonya Rahming
- 01-01-22
Good book
I loved this read and was determined to finish it. The transitions of the main character are priceless.
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- Michelle
- 08-10-20
Surprised
I bought this book by accident. I am not fiction reader so I didn’t i would like this book. But I was pleasantly surprised. I couldn’t put the book down and finished it nearly in on sitting. Excellent story about love and life set in China. If anything, one should read this to help raise cultural awareness and understanding. Lovely story. Highly recommend.
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- Parents of three
- 02-07-21
Comical narration, but good story
The narrator’s voice went into cartoon-funny mode with some characters. Weird. But the story was good - sad and timeless. Kindness in the midst of heartache. Forgiveness and understanding, even though nothing will ever be the same. I didn’t expect that ending. Not exactly a happily ever after ending. But at the same time, an ending full of love. Read it. See for yourself.
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- Samm Cadwell
- 09-28-21
Read the book. Don’t listen to this recording.
The narrator really almost ruined this story for me. The voices were atrocious, and many were so cartoony. Save your credit. Read the book, skip audio book until it is redone with a new narrator.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Catherine Puma
- 03-03-22
Moving Contemporary Chinese Fiction
In "Life", Lu Yao describes the opportunities and struggles protagonist Gao Jialin goes through at a pinnacle time in his young life. This is not only a portrait of contemporary Chinese life, but also representative of universal difficulties people face when making important relationship, career, and lifestyle choices that will undoubtedly affect their future financial security and social life.
While the story, characters, and world-building itself were all quite good, and I'm really glad I read this, there are some things that might have gotten lost in translation. There are a couple of clichés that are used, and some of which I do not believe exist in either Mandarin or Cantonese, so I'm not sure if the translator used clichés as an easy way out or as a necessity when there was a Chinese phrase for which there is no real way to translate it into English. Similarly, there was a poem or song or two that were super awkward in English--which I completely understand--but I wish there had been footnotes or a translator's introduction or reading of the original side-by-side or something to help build the intending mood of said poem/song.
Another side note: while I do recommend anyone interested to pick this up, I do NOT recommend the Audible version narrated by Robert Wu. He did ridiculous voices for EVERY character that wasn't the protagonist; it was so frustrating and stupid. Wu made Gao Jialin's father sound like a doofus and his mother sound like Dobby! I have no idea why he chose to narrate this way; was he trying to insert comedy where there was none? Are his over-the-top voices supposed to be making fun of the countryside folk, and if so, isn't that super offensive and exactly NOT what the author is going for here? Wu's horrible narration almost made me want to stop reading, but it isn't a super long book, so I made myself power through. I was just ashamed to have this on while anyone else was in the same room. Read a different narration or get a physical copy, please.
Those snafus aside, this story has heart and realistic characters and good symbolism. I recommend to those who like contemporary fiction, Chinese fiction, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Amy Tan, Lisa See, Pearl S. Buck, historical fiction, 1980's fiction, translated fiction, international fiction, rural vs. city life struggles, love triangles, and open endings.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Barbara McQueen
- 05-23-20
Not My Cup of Tea
I liked the exposure to Chinese life during its revolutionary past, and there were some interesting insights about attitudes toward relationships and class, but I had very little sympathy for the heartaches most of the main characters caused themselves and the very vulgar language that regularly popped up.
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