The Cleaners Audiobook By Ken Liu cover art

The Cleaners

Faraway collection

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The Cleaners

By: Ken Liu
Narrated by: Kate Rudd
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About this listen

Touch the past or wash it away? Two sisters have a choice in this unforgettable short story of everyday magic and the power of memory by the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Ken Liu.

Gui is a professional cleaner at A Fresh Start, scrubbing away the unpleasant layers of memory that build up on the personal objects of his customers. Memory-blind himself, he can’t feel those wounds. Clara can, and she prefers them irretrievable. Until her sister, Beatrice, ultrasensitive to memory, raises one that could change Clara’s mind. For Gui, the past is gone. For Clara and Beatrice, deciding what to remember reaches to the heart of their shared history.

The Cleaners is part of Faraway, a collection of retold fairy tales that take the happily-ever-after in daring new directions. Whether read or listened to in one sitting, prepare to be charmed, moved, enlightened, and frightened all over again.

©2020 Ken Liu (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Contemporary Fantasy Fiction Short Stories Funny
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About the Creator - Ken Liu

About the Creator

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards for his fiction, he has also won top genre honors abroad in Japan, Spain, and France.
Liu’s most characteristic work is the four-volume epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers, not wizards, are the heroes of a silkpunk world on the verge of modernity. His debut collection of short fiction, The Paper Menagerie And Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl And Other Stories, followed. He also penned the Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker.
He’s often involved in media adaptations of his work. Recent projects include The Message, under development by 21 Laps and Film Nation Entertainment; Good Hunting, adapted as an episode in season one of Netflix’s breakout adult animated series Love, Death + Robots, and AMC’s Pantheon, with Craig Silverstein as executive producer, adapted from an interconnected series of Liu’s short stories.
Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.
Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

What listeners say about The Cleaners

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The Cleaners was Unique

This short story is very unique. It talks about the power of memories and how they affect different people. How people can distance themselves from others due to the emotions caused by the memories and how others can find strength in holding on to them.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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Deserves a Whole Novel

I need more time in this universe to truly understand the way memory cleaning works, to get to know the characters more. And I really, really want too! Very intriguing and thought provoking

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1 person found this helpful

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Excellent concept

I really enjoyed the premise of this book. The idea was novel and the story told in a believable way. With it split from three different people's point of view, it got a bit hard to follow at points, trying to remember whose point was being made, but overall a pleasant listen.

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  • Overall
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    5 out of 5 stars

A touching story about family and memory

Giu is a cleaner, the owner of A Fresh Start, and he cleans away the unpleasant memories that have adhered to his customers' personal possessions. Giu has an unusual handicap in this world; he's memory-blind. He's not able to feel or read even his own memories on objects, and that created a challenge for his parents in teaching him their trade. Yet it also gives him certain advantages; he doesn't feel the pains of the bad memories he's scraping away.

Beatrice is hyper-sensitive, and makes a very good living doing forensic readings of memories attached to items involved in legal cases.

Clara has a fairly normal level of memory sensitivity, and after a bad breakup with her former boyfriend, wants to rid their shared items that he left behind of the painful memories. For this, she turns to Giu.

But Clara and Beatrice are sisters, and has an old, four-color pen that holds a memory that's at the heart of what binds them together.

When Beatrice invites Clara to lunch, and hands Clara that pen, Clara experiences that memory again, in full, and has something to think about that might change her mind.

It's an interesting, thoughtful, and touching story.

Recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

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So much to contemplate that I listened twice

THE CLEANERS by Ken Liu has an amazing premise, and it was fascinating to think about it on a personal level: what memories would I have removed from my life and existence? Any? Many? The writing really stands out , with a bunch of quotable lines that really sink in and mean something bigger, beyond the story itself. Particularly interesting to me and what I really enjoy are the bookish references and the idea of what each reader brings with them to read the book. There is much to contemplate in this short story (a one-hour listen), so I listened to it twice in a row. Kate Rudd’s narration is excellent.

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Didn’t Like It! 😔

Didn’t like this story. Just did not work for me. At only about 53 minutes, I honestly could not wait for this one to be over….boring. 😒

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Loved It!!

A great story that I'm going to both listen to & read a few times in order to do it justice.
An original idea based on ancient wisdom. Bravo!

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Meh

I didn’t enjoy this one even close to as much as the first 3. The narration was good but I found the story lacking.

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Worth the listen.

Good, as expected for Liu’s work. Short tight and sweet.
I liked it a lot.

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Creative and thought provoking

A very intriguing story and one I wouldn't mind reading a longer version of.

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