
Vanishing World
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Nancy Wu
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By:
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Sayaka Murata
About this listen
From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.
Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre and troubling effect. Her depictions of a happily unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman convinced she is an alien in Earthlings have endeared her to millions of listeners worldwide. Vanishing World takes Murata’s universe to a bold new level, imagining an alternative Japan where attitudes to sex and procreation are wildly different to our own.
As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated” in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-20th century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system” by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage—sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest—Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only “Kodomo-chan.” Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?
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Story
When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and starts driving west. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States.
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Sad life, sad ending
- By C. R. Choate on 05-17-25
By: Ariel Courage
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Open, Heaven
- A Novel
- By: Seán Hewitt
- Narrated by: Sebastian Croft
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives. James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries.
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What a writer!
- By Russ on 06-03-25
By: Seán Hewitt
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Sing to Me
- A Novel
- By: Jesse Browner
- Narrated by: Samara Naeymi
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
His family farm and the surrounding community now emptied by war, young Hani embarks on an epic quest–assisted by a brooding yet brilliant donkey–to find his lost sister in the ruins of Troy. Some war stories transcend time and circumstance, and so it is with the resourceful and heartbroken Hani, who must employ every bit of intelligence, every scrap of ingenuity, and ultimately every ounce of his spirit and humor to withstand the forces of civilization’s collapse.
By: Jesse Browner
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The Float Test
- A Novel
- By: Lynn Steger Strong
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Kenner siblings are at odds. Jenn is a harried mom struggling under the weight of family obligations. Fred is a novelist who can’t write, maybe because she’s lost faith in storytelling itself. Jude is a recovering corporate lawyer with her own story to tell, and a grudge against her former favorite sister, Fred. George, the baby, is estranged from his wife and harboring both a secret about his former employer and an ill-advised crush on one of his sisters’ friends. Gathered after a major loss, each sibling needs the others more than ever—if only they could trust each other.
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Tolstoy was wrong
- By tallybroom on 06-01-25
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I Will Blossom Anyway
- A Novel
- By: Disha Bose
- Narrated by: Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The third of four children born to a middle-class Calcutta family, quiet Durga is surprisingly the first to leave the nest of her loving, overbearing family. She is not as charming as her older sister, Tia, as lighthearted as her brother, Arjun, or as clever as her younger sister, Parul. But when she arrives in Ireland to work at a tech company, she finds that for the first time ever she is free—to have fun, to stay out, to sample everything that life has to offer. Suddenly, Durga can be whoever she wants to be. And she wants it all. But freedom comes at a price.
By: Disha Bose
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Metallic Realms
- A Novel
- By: Lincoln Michel
- Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln finds his life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic lives of the pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns—he has a higher calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written word: The Star Rot Chronicles.
By: Lincoln Michel
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Cat's People
- A Novel
- By: Tanya Guerrero
- Narrated by: Elena Rey
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Núria, a single-by-choice barista with a little resentment for the “crazy cat lady” label, is a member of The Meow-Yorkers, a group in Brooklyn who takes care of the neighborhood’s stray cats. On her volunteering days, she starts finding Post-it notes left by a secret admirer in an area where she feeds her favorite stray—a black cat named Cat. Like most felines, he is both curious and observant, so of course he knows who the notes are from. Núria, however, is clueless.
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LOVED this book!
- By JAY on 05-22-25
By: Tanya Guerrero
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Perspective(s)
- A Novel
- By: Laurent Binet, Sam Taylor - translator
- Narrated by: Eve Passeltiner, Robert Fass
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As dawn breaks over the city of Florence on New Year's Day 1557, Jacopo da Pontormo is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him are the frescoes he labored over for more than a decade―masterpieces all, rivaling the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. When guards search his quarters, they find an obscene painting of Venus and Cupid―with the face of Venus replaced by that of Maria de' Medici, the Duke of Florence's oldest daughter. The city erupts in chaos.
By: Laurent Binet, and others
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What Will People Think?
- A Novel
- By: Sara Hamdan
- Narrated by: Reem Edan
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Equal parts funny and tender, What Will People Think? is a heart-bursting exploration of what it means to discover and embrace the hidden parts of yourself, and how love in all forms can make you whole.
By: Sara Hamdan
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My Documents
- A Novel
- By: Kevin Nguyen
- Narrated by: Kelly Marie Tran
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Informed by real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen’s novel gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to one another, and to ourselves, after tragedy.
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Captivating story
- By Melissa Youngman on 05-30-25
By: Kevin Nguyen
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A Line You Have Traced
- By: Roisin Dunnett
- Narrated by: Kim Bretton
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Against a backdrop of growing violence and environmental collapse, three women living centuries apart search for meaning and connection by becoming obsessed with a mysterious red book. A Line You Have Traced asks what we owe to those who will come after us, and what it might cost us.
By: Roisin Dunnett
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Where the Dead Brides Gather
- By: Nuzo Onoh
- Narrated by: Nene Nwoko
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Bata, a young girl tormented by nightmares, wakes up one night to find herself standing sentinel before her cousin's door. Her cousin is to get married the next morning, but only if she can escape the murderous attack of a ghost-bride, who used to be engaged to her groom. A supernatural possession helps Bata battle and vanquish the vengeful ghost bride, and following a botched exorcism, she is transported to Ibaja-La, the realm of dead brides. There, she receives secret powers to fight malevolent ghost-brides before being sent back to the human realm.
By: Nuzo Onoh
Excellent
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