On Such a Full Sea
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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B. D. Wong
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By:
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Chang-rae Lee
About this listen
From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker, The Surrendered, and My Year Abroad, a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman’s legendary quest in a shocking, future America.
On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee’s elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way listeners think about the world they live in.
In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class - descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China - find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.
In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.
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Critic reviews
“Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and On Such a Full Sea provides all that and more...With On Such a Full Sea, [Chang-rae Lee] has found a new way to explore his old preoccupation: the oft-told tale of the desperate, betraying, lonely human heart.” (Andrew Sean Greer, The New York Times Book Review)
“I've never been a fan of grand hyperbolic declarations in book reviews, but faced with On Such a Full Sea, I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?” (Porochista Khakpour, The Los Angeles Times)
"In his latest and boldest novel, On Such a Full Sea, Lee’s characters are Chinese immigrant workers in the United States - specifically Chinese workers from a long-elapsed China toiling in a fast-declining America a century or so from now. For Lee’s heroine, Fan, the issue is not acclimatization but self-discovery. The adventures of this feisty yet wary protagonist, together with a bleak but arresting vision of the future, keep the reader rapt and concerned for the fate of both beleaguered character and battered brave new world." (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
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The Quintland Sisters
- A Novel
- By: Shelley Wood
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Reluctant midwife Emma Trimpany is just 17 when she assists at the harrowing birth of the Dionne quintuplets: five tiny miracles born to French farmers in hardscrabble Northern Ontario in 1934. Emma cares for them through their perilous first days, and when the government decides to remove the babies from their francophone parents, making them wards of the British king, Emma signs on as their nurse.
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Couldn’t enjoy the book because of poor narrator
- By Anonymous User on 06-29-22
By: Shelley Wood
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The Walking People
- By: Mary Beth Keane
- Narrated by: Sile Bermingham
- Length: 16 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Greta Cahill never believed she would leave her village in the west of Ireland until she found herself on a ship bound for New York, along with her sister Johanna and a boy named Michael Ward. Labeled a "softheaded goose" by her family, Greta discovers that in America she can fall in love, raise her own family, and earn a living.
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Irish immigratn story
- By Chrissie on 09-10-13
By: Mary Beth Keane
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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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The Unit
- By: Ninni Holmqvist
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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When Dorrit Wegner turned fifty, the government transferred her to a state-of-the-art facility where she can live out her days in comfort. Her apartment is furnished to her tastes, her meals expertly served, and all at the very reasonable non-negotiable price of one cardiopulmonary system. Once an outsider without family, derided by a society bent on productivity, Dorrit finds within The Unit the company of kindred spirits and a dignity conferred by 'use' in medical tests.
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Makes you think
- By Sylvia on 01-30-11
By: Ninni Holmqvist
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Mustique Island
- A Novel
- By: Sarah McCoy
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s January 1972 but the sun is white hot when Willy May Michael’s boat first kisses the dock of Mustique Island. Tucked into the southernmost curve of the Caribbean, Mustique is a private island that has become a haven for the wealthy and privileged. Its owner is the eccentric British playboy Colin Tennant, who is determined to turn this speck of white sand into a luxurious neo-colonial retreat for his rich friends and into a royal court in exile for the Queen’s rebellious sister, Princess Margaret.
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Vivid Imagery
- By GeauxGetLit on 07-24-22
By: Sarah McCoy
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Wedding Ring
- A Shenandoah Album Novel
- By: Emilie Richards
- Narrated by: Isabel Keating
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Needing time to contemplate her troubled marriage, Tessa MacRae agrees to spend the summer helping her mother and grandmother clean out the family home in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. But the three women have never been close.
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Loved it All Over Again
- By Kathryn @theBookDate on 03-26-16
By: Emilie Richards
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Secret Daughter
- By: Shilpi Somaya Gowda
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Debut novelist Shilpi Somaya Gowda pens this compelling tale about two families, worlds apart, linked by one Indian child. After giving birth to a girl for a second time, impoverished Kavita must give her up to an orphanage. The baby, named Asha, is adopted by an American doctor and raised in California. But once grown, Asha decides to return to India.
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A Must Read
- By Stephanie on 06-08-11
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Language Arts
- By: Stephanie Kallos
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Marlow is a Seattle English teacher who instructs his students to expand their worlds through language. Lately, however, with one child off to college and the pressure from his ex-wife to make plans for their severely autistic son who's about to age out of the system, he prefers the company of the ghosts he turns up in the storage boxes in his crawl space.
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The beauty of the broken
- By SJ Evans on 04-27-18
By: Stephanie Kallos
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The Silent History
- By: Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, LJ Ganser
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own.
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A Thought-Provoking Premise
- By Doug - Audible on 03-31-15
By: Eli Horowitz, and others
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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Deborah Moggach
- Narrated by: Juliet Mills
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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When Ravi Kapoor, an overworked London doctor, reaches the breaking point with his difficult father-in-law, he asks his wife: “Can’t we just send him away somewhere? Somewhere far, far away.” His prayer is seemingly answered when Ravi’s entrepreneurial cousin sets up a retirement home in India, hoping to re-create in Bangalore an elegant lost corner of England. Several retirees are enticed by the promise of indulgent living at a bargain price, but upon arriving, they are dismayed to find that restoration of the once sophisiticated hotel has stalled....
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Screenwriters Changed it for the Better
- By Carole T. on 06-05-12
By: Deborah Moggach
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The Lost Carousel of Provence
- By: Juliet Blackwell
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Long, lonely years have passed for the crumbling Château Clement, nestled well beyond the rolling lavender fields and popular tourist attractions of Provence. Once a bustling and dignified ancestral estate, now all that remains is the château's gruff, elderly owner and the softly whispered secrets of generations buried and forgotten. But time has a way of exposing history's dark stains, and when American photographer Cady Drake finds herself drawn to the château and its antique carousel, she longs to explore the relic's shadowy origins.
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Loved It!
- By T Heskett on 09-23-18
By: Juliet Blackwell
What listeners say about On Such a Full Sea
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kindle Customer
- 05-31-14
Intriguing but slow
Any additional comments?
As a person who needs a story with some momentum, I wasn't able to get into this book. The writing is beautiful, with careful and sparse diction. The author creates a strong sense of place, with an atmosphere that is worrisome most of all in the degree to which everyone treats it as normal. The main character is described (at least in the portion I read) from a detached vantage point that leaves her deliberately somewhat opaque. The anonymous narrator is perplexed by her decisions. The narration was perfectly suited to the portion of the book I listened to.
While I did become curious about what happened to Fan and how her journey went, the pace did not pick up early enough in the book, nor was I sufficiently attached to the characters, to continue listening. I liked the world-building but I didn't have the willpower to keep paying attention. Yet this wasn't a book that I sought a refund for, because it felt like it might be sufficiently worthwhile to try again when I have more patience.
If you are a listener who prefers relatively fast-paced books, think twice about this one. Or, if you are a listener with a lot of patience, please post a review to let the rest of us know if it's worth the effort!
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2 people found this helpful
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- DaWoolf
- 02-14-14
Overrated!
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
Chang-rae Lee's "On Such a Full Sea" (Sea) received very strong reviews from the New York Times and The Guardian. I was less than impressed. Sea has an imaginative premise, but lacks a solid story to maintain the reader's engagement. Throughout Sea the reader never feels a sense of conclusion as so many questions and issues are unresolved. At points Sea seems like a series of unconnected short stories with only a single familiar character. References to dystopia science fiction theme are overblown (one reviewer comparing Sea to Brave New World). Chang-rae Lee leaves you in dark relative to the development or history of the dystopia society.
I will pay Chang-rae Lee his due respect as a writing of prose. He is the master of describing what others are feeling, observing, or experiencing. Ultimately, despite the technical perfection of the writing the reader just doesn't care about the characters.
I have read 56 books in the last two years, where Sea ranks in 44th position (21%).
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7 people found this helpful
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- Dr. Jonathan L. Kramer
- 06-03-19
I kept hoping, but...
I really wanted this book to lead somewhere, but for me it didn't. the best part was B.D. Wong's read.
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- Kevin J. Yellick
- 04-30-19
plot spins out unevenly
Overall the book is an interesting read but it is told so unevenly that it got in the way of enjoying it.
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- LancerLandshark
- 05-06-19
Thrilling and well-narrated
Wonderfully performed, and a very human story set in a unique take on the future.
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- E. A. Vogt
- 03-26-14
feels like part one of a serial
What did you like best about On Such a Full Sea? What did you like least?
It is an engaging story, but too much of the storyline is unexplained. I would read part 2 (assuming this is going to turn into a serial) just to see what happens next...
What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?
I thought all of it was very interesting.
Have you listened to any of B. D. Wong’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
This was the first time I listened to Wong narrate. I thought he did a wonderful job!
Could you see On Such a Full Sea being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?
no
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2 people found this helpful
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- Cai
- 04-24-19
Riveting alt-future / dystopia(?)
Compelling and dark, yet with shades of hope, this provocative story takes us through a possible future - if the ever-growing US of A were to lose its place as a world power and instead decline for an extended time.
There was no singular event that triggered this alt-future in Lee's unique world. One could even imagine bright stories existing in this world. But would they be as compelling?
Lee's narrative voice pulls the reader along, and somehow manages to soothe some of the darker moments. Not that the darkness is sugar-coated, but when wondering if maybe it was too dark to continue, somehow I kept listening. The story telling hit just the right notes for this reader.
Wong's narration was delightfully transparent, with excellent pacing and distinct voices.
Filing this one under #ReadAgain. (If only Audible would let readers sort or tag books in our ever-growing libraries...)
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- David
- 03-18-17
Literary dystopian fiction
Chang-Rae Lee's dystopian story of an America in decline, occupied generations ago by "New Chinese" who have displaced the Anglo and African-American residents of the major cities and pushed them out into the surrounding, anarchic "Counties," reads like one of those dystopian novels written by a literary author who's decided to try his hand at dystopian novels. I could compare On Such a Full Sea with Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, or Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, or Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. All of these books are similar - they depict a world in which economic and environmental collapse has brought down the old governments, and new peoples, new orders, have filled in the gaps. The haves and have-nots are more sharply divided. Outside the enclaves of the privileged is lawlessness and a grinding fight for survival.
On Such a Full Sea is well-written literary fiction that covers all of this ground in an engaging story, but it never convinced me that Chang-Rae Lee is more than a visitor to the genre. There isn't a lot of imagination in his post-collapse story, no technological speculation, very little in the way of reimagined futuristic society, just some issues of identity and class and racial divides that still exist even in a reconfigured landscape, and a heroine who is an impressive, admirable, yet very ordinary young girl who sets off into the Counties looking for her boyfriend, who has disappeared.
Fan, the main character, is a diver for fish in B-Mor (formerly Baltimore). The story is ostensibly told after the fact of the events described, in which Fan has become a kind of legend, an inspiration for the people of B-Mor. The B-Morans, descendants of Chinese workers who came to the East Coast after an undescribed collapse of the United States, are the "working class" of this future. The "Charters" are the privileged wealthy who still live the equivalent of middle class to affluent lifestyles, though as the book progresses and Fan and meets several groups of people from various walks of life, it becomes apparent that even for the Charters, the economy is such that a fall from grace, consignment to the laboring class or even banishment to the Counties, is always a worrisome possibility.
Fan's adventures take her through some harrowing (but much less harrowing than some dystopian writers would depict) adventures in those Counties, which really aren't Mad Max wastelands but more like a Wild West in which some towns have well-regulated law and order, others are ruled by despots, and others have no law at all. Then she goes through a series of stays with Charter families, some of them kindly, some of them creepy, all of them a bit blinkered by the privilege of their own existence.
Then there is an ending, which was, I suppose, a literary ending.
It's a good book in the sense that it was well-constructed, with a lot of prose that waxes more elegiac than usual for sci-fi, and Fan is a likeable, sturdy, determined girl.
Still, I have a bit of a bias against authors who give the impression they are slumming with sci-fi. Cormac McCarthy did it with The Road. Kazuo Ishiguro did it a little with his book, whose science fictional premise was thin and nigh-on unbelievable. Margaret Atwood actually writes SF even if she's taken some flack for eschewing the label. David Mitchell is a literary author who embraces the genre.
Chang-Rae Lee seemed to be telling another story, with dystopian fiction as his medium. It's a good story, but it did not really embrace the elements of the genre, and so to me it lacked the imagination to be truly brilliant. It's a good book for those who like some literary-flavored speculative fiction, but it is not likely to impress veterans of the genre.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Boomer
- 10-10-22
Hard to connect to main character
The entire story is written in third person so I found it hard to get to know the main character.
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- K. Taylor
- 05-28-15
Uniquely Compelling Tale
The writing was exquisite, the story both riveting and provocative and I already searched for my next book by narrator. He's soothing and poetic and brings the words to life with evocative prowess.
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2 people found this helpful