The Left Hand of Darkness Audiobook By Ursula K. Le Guin, Charlie Jane Anders - afterword cover art

The Left Hand of Darkness

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The Left Hand of Darkness

By: Ursula K. Le Guin, Charlie Jane Anders - afterword
Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan, Michael Crouch
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The queen of science fiction’s trailblazing novel about a planet full of genderless beings

A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary’s mission to Winter, an unknown alien world whose inhabitants can choose—and change—their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so, he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.

Exploring questions of psychology, society, and human emotion in an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of science fiction.

©1969 Ursula K. Le Guin / Author's Note ©1976 by Ursula K. Le Guin / Introduction reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of David Mitchell ©2000 by David Mitchell / Afterword by Charlie Jane Anders ©2019 by Charlie Jane Anders, from The Left Hand of Darkness: 50th Anniversary Edition by Ursula K. Le Guin, used by permission of Ace, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.","year":"1969 (P)2024 Recorded Books First Contact Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Space Exploration Fiction
Masterful Worldbuilding • Thought-provoking Creativity • Immersive Performance • Cultural Exploration • Mystical Fable
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Called customer service & was told this version was added without chapter divisions. Please fix!🤞🏿 HOWEVER... This is a BRILLIANT story! Deeply explores two different cultures... & turns out to be a story abut love.

Expansive, thought-provoking creativity. Surprising story. Please fix upload!

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An incredible rendering of one of the greatest books of all time. Crouch's love for this book brings light and warmth to Le Guin's cold and mysterious world.

A singularly great performance of a classic

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This is one of those books that I re-read and get more every time. Beautiful prose, deep themes, and human characters.
While it's written in form of reports and correspondence from several characters, the book feels more like a mystical fable.

A true masterpiece

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This was the first sci-fi book and the first book by Le Guin i read when I was little. this version of it is so well read the beauty of the book truly shines.

my favorite book of all time m

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My second time listening and while I love George Guidall, Michael Crouch’s narration brings a subtlety and power that immersed me even further into the rich reality of the novel. Production is excellent as well. Looking forward to the next time I listen again.

A masterpiece reignited

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This novel illustrates why LeGuin is one of America’s greatest writers. No “sci-fi” or “female” qualifiers. Just a great writer. Drawing on her father’s career as an anthropologist, she creates a detailed anthropology of another time, another planet, and another race — so detailed as to leave the reader feeling as though she has just scratched the surface. That thought experiment provokes metaphors and comparisons to our own times in more ways than even she perhaps contemplated. Couch’s performance was good, not great, and I could have done without the normative “LeGuin should have done these things instead” portions of the Afterword to this 2019 version. That seemed gratuitous politically slanted, and often redundant. I suspect that the Afterword will not age nearly as well as the brilliant novel itself has.

A Perfectly Sketched Universe

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UKL was legitimately wise and a writer of timeless talent. This book is astonishing and bears rereading. The sound of the voice alone for this reading is perfect and their performance brought so much more of the tale than I thought possible to the surface so my ears could hear it. Amazing.

A perfect performance of a work of wisdom

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I highly recommend this book! Le Guin is a master of world building, and more than anything, this is a story to let you explore a different world, with people who are at times wildly different from us, yet also similar in other respects, allowing for a cultural meeting that the story follows from the start to the end, with intriguing and believable consequences.

This book is for expanding your imagination. This book is the kind of book you listen to in order to grow as a person.

This book is important

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A narrator needed to vary the voicing more than they did to facilitate identification of characters plus it was rather bland. The book however, is quite good.

Excellent book, but not impressed by narration

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Interesting concept but she has done way better. There are some great one-liners. Something like, “Mountains should be seen, not heard.”

Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.

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