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The Book of Strange New Things
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Josh D. Cohen
- Length: 19 hrs and 27 mins
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Publisher's summary
A monumental, genre-defying novel that David Mitchell calls "Michel Faber’s second masterpiece," The Book of Strange New Things is a masterwork from a writer in full command of his many talents.
It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC.
His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter’s teachings—his Bible is their “book of strange new things.” But Peter is rattled when Bea’s letters from home become increasingly desperate: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries, and governments are crumbling. Bea’s faith, once the guiding light of their lives, begins to falter.
Suddenly, a separation measured by an otherworldly distance, and defined both by one newly discovered world and another in a state of collapse, is threatened by an ever-widening gulf that is much less quantifiable. While Peter is reconciling the needs of his congregation with the desires of his strange employer, Bea is struggling for survival. Their trials lay bare a profound meditation on faith, love tested beyond endurance, and our responsibility to those closest to us.
Marked by the same bravura storytelling and precise language that made The Crimson Petal and the White such an international success, The Book of Strange New Things is extraordinary, mesmerizing, and replete with emotional complexity and genuine pathos.
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Editorial reviews
Critic reviews
A New Yorker Best Book of 2014
An NPR Great Read of 2014
A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014
Selected as one of the Independent’s Books of the Year 2014
An io9.com Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2014
An ABA Indie Next Pick
A Fresno Bee Favorite Book of 2014
A Guardian Writers Pick of 2014, Selected by Jackie Kay
Selected as one of Kansas City Star’s 100 Best Books of 2014
Selected by Financial Times’ David Mitchell as a Favorite Book of 2014
A Book Riot Best Book of 2014
A BookBrowse Top Book of 2014
Goodreads.com Best Book of the Month
A Kirkus Must-reads
A Barnes & Noble Fiction Selection, Top Books for the Holiday Season
A ShelfAwareness Best Books of 2014 Honorable Mention
A Minnesota Public Radio Best Books of 2014 Selection
Publishers Lunch news editor Sarah Weinman’s best of the year list, honorable mention
A Rick Riordan Favorite Read of 2014
A PopMatters Best Books of 2014
“Defiantly unclassifiable. . . . The Book of Strange New Things squeezes its genre ingredients to yield a meditation on suffering, love and the origins of religious faith. . . . Faber reminds us there is a literature of enchantment, which invites the reader to participate in the not-real in order to wake from a dream of reality to the ineffability, strangeness, and brevity of life on Earth.” —Marcel Theroux, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
“Provocative, unsettling.” —People
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Vergil's innovative experiment restructuring the cells of a common virus becomes a nightmare when, in order to save his research, Vergil injects the entire culture into his bloodstream.
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THOUGHT UNIVERSE
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 08-01-15
By: Greg Bear
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Future Home of the Living God
- A Novel
- By: Louise Erdrich
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- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
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The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backward, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.
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“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”
- By Mel on 11-27-17
By: Louise Erdrich
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The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5
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- Narrated by: Tom Dheere, Nancy Linari
- Length: 15 hrs and 54 mins
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Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.
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Narrator sounds like Tony Danza
- By Sean on 03-05-16
By: Cory Doctorow, and others
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Fire and Rain
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Into the drought-weary California town of Valle Rosa comes a stranger who promises he can make it rain. All he asks for is a place to stay and complete privacy. But he is too charismatic to maintain a low profile, and the adobe cottage he's given to live in is owned by an investigative TV reporter struggling to revive her career.
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Siri from my Iphone would be a warmer narrator
- By Gwen on 05-30-16
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Honor
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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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Stories
- All-New Tales
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
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The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination
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Mad scientists have never had it so tough. In super-hero comics, graphic novels, films, TV series, video games, and even works of what may be fiction, they are besieged by those who stand against them, devoid of sympathy for their irrational, megalomaniacal impulses to rule, destroy, or otherwise dominate the world as we know it. It’s just not fair. So those of us who are so twisted and sick that we love mad scientists have created this guide.
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HAND DANCING
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The Evolution of Thomas Hall
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Thomas Hall is an artist with astonishing talent - and a vainglorious sense of self. Since his days as a child prodigy he has reveled in recognition and believed in his inevitable destiny. Chosen. Entitled. He presumes his artistic brilliance deserves a lavish life of independence, fast cars, and drop-dead gorgeous women. Thomas Hall wants it all and more. Destiny has other plans. When "Cass", the woman from the Healing Place, walks into his life, nothing can ever be the same again.
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Amazing!!
- By Nancy Brower on 05-19-23
By: Kieth Merrill
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My Soul to Keep
- By: Tananarive Due
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When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost.
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A Book I Can't Keep
- By Mistsofjade on 07-19-20
By: Tananarive Due
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Three Daughters of Eve
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Set across Istanbul and Oxford, from the 1980s to the present day, Three Daughters of Eve is a sweeping tale of faith and friendship, tradition and modernity, love and an unexpected betrayal. Peri, a wealthy Turkish housewife and mother, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground - an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor.
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Review 3 daughters of Eve
- By CA on 04-28-18
By: Elif Shafak
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Strong Motion
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Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
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Compelling Story, Ridiculous Narrator
- By DianeReads on 02-28-16
By: Jonathan Franzen
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A great spooky atmosphere captured well in audio
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What listeners say about The Book of Strange New Things
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Julie W. Capell
- 06-20-16
Thoughtful 1st contact scifi w communication focus
This beautiful, moving book strongly reminded me of the years I lived abroad and my time as an English as a Second Language teacher. It’s about communication – the difficulty of understanding another being – whether you are from the same neighborhood or completely different planets. Yes, there’s a lot about faith and God, but you do not have to be a deeply religious person to get a lot out of this novel. In scifi terms, it’s not an action-based plot, so those expecting a thrill-a-minute will be disappointed. But if you like your thoughtful first-contact scifi with a bit of linguistics added in, you will get a lot out of this novel.
[I listened to this as an audio book performed by Josh Cohen. I thought he did a great job with the alien language, but I did speed up the audio to 1.25 because he read a bit slowly for my taste.]
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- Hannah V
- 10-24-17
Mixed emotions
This book was slow at times, and hard to follow at others, but it really sucked you in. I didn’t like the ambiguity of the ending, and wish we knew what happened to Peter, Bea, Oasis, and Earth.
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- Adam Shields
- 05-26-16
Science fiction with sensibilities of Literary Fic
The story is simple, Peter, pastor with a history of drug abuse and alcoholism prior to becoming a Christian is hired to go to the planet Oasis to minister to the aliens there. A lot has been made of this being a genre defying novel, but I did not think that it was widely outside of either Literary Fiction or Science Fiction and fans of both should consider it part of the genre they prefer most.
The main story of the book is really about the marriage of Peter on Oasis and his wife, Bea, back in England. They can communicate, but only via email like plain text. And then, only when he is at the main human complex and not when he is living with the aliens. The physical distance matters. But the experiential difference matters more. For Peter, he is absorbed in his work and the transition from the alien settlement to the human settlement is always a cultural shock. Add to that the increasing desperation of Bea, and Peter emotionally hides.
The book drags a little bit in the middle. The cultural learning that Peter needs to do learn about the aliens, and about the humans that are willing to go to an alien world, matters to the story, but there is a lot of explanation and internal dialogue. This is primarily an internal book. There are a few segments of action, but the main story is about people and culture and marriage and faith. I generally like internal books and I certainly like this one. But there is a bit of drag to the middle and the end will not please many.
The author is not a Christian, but gets so much right about Christianity in the book. World Magazine named it their fiction book of the year in 2015. I saw one person compared The Book of Strange New Things to The Poisonwood Bible, which other than the fact they are both about missionaries seems like an odd comparison. Both the missionary characters want to share their faith, but there is a real difference in method. Peter truly loves the aliens, while the father in Poisonwood Bible seems oblivious to the humanness of the Africans that he is ministering to. In both books there is an all consuming focus which leaves the needs of the families far behind the needs of the work.
In the end I think the exploration of ideas about marriage and distance and the exploration of faith and calling makes this well worth reading, even it is a little long and meandering at times. The audiobook was very well done.
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- Michael R Pearce
- 04-30-15
Very good
Like many great stories, it engages you and then frustratingly leaves you wanting to engage more with the characters even at the end. Well done.
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- Public Name
- 04-15-20
good story but some voices are just too much to ta
struggled to finish. intriguing story but the narrated voices of the aliens was just too hard to listen to
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- Timothy
- 04-13-17
Excellent portrayal of a Christian in space
This was a really good story that kept me interested to the end. The standout aspect of the book was the excellent portrayal of a Christian minister in a difficult situation.
Unlike other books about space-going evangelists that I've seen, there is no parody or mockery of faith or Christianity here. The portrayal of the Christian minister protagonist rings true and spot-on. It was so good that at first I suspected that the author was a Christian himself, and this was a "Christian book" in disguise, but that's definitely not the case.
My main complaint about the book is that it doesn't deliver on all of the interesting threads that are started throughout the story. I felt that this was a big problem for the book. Even though it was a fun listen, the ending left me very disappointed.
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- Carl Ryan Stemple
- 11-08-14
As Odd and Dispiriting as it is Capitvating
If you could sum up The Book of Strange New Things in three words, what would they be?
Lonely, cosmic heartbreak.
What did you like best about this story?
The fantastical elements of the book either creep up on you so slow or are thrust upon you so fast that you're as genuinely jarred as the main character upon realizing that the world you're visiting is unlike anything you'd expected or experienced. This happens because of how believable and grounded so much of the story is in the things we understand and can relate to - loneliness, crisis of faith, determination of will and the inability to communicate with a far away loved one, among others.
What does Josh Cohen bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I wouldn't necessarily say that Faber's story doesn't stand well enough on simply the merits of his words, because he's crafted something that's at once both thrillingly alien and resonantly human at the core. But having experienced his novel through Josh Cohen's mammoth range of raw, realized characterizations, I couldn't possibly fathom the story divorced of him.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The third-to-last and second-to-last chapters - in the infirmary with Jesus Lover 5 and in Peter's Church with him speaking in all Oassan - are both equally crushing.
Any additional comments?
On top of his skillful handling of international accents that are individually crafted for every single character so that you know that person intimately the moment they appear and reappear in the story, Cohen's unique and jaw-dropping representation of the Oassans' gargling, guttural dialect is something masterful to behold.
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- CARRIE JANELL BRIGGS
- 08-20-15
Ugh
There better be a sequel! It's like he came up with a story but couldn't figure out how to end it. Just lots of unanswered questions.
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- Dona
- 02-14-15
Ending!
Hated the ending! loved the journey. It left me wanting to know more. Maybe a sequel is in the works. I have nothing more to say!
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- Anonymous User
- 10-25-22
OMG
Absolute, arduous torture. I've listen to most of Mr Faber's books and knew going forward that this one might be as annoying as the last, but I'm an optimist.
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