
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?
©2025 Sayaka Murata (P)2025 Simon & Schuster AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth.
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Intriguing but disturbing
- By C. Parham on 01-01-21
By: Sayaka Murata
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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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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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Open, Heaven
- A Novel
- By: Seán Hewitt
- Narrated by: Sebastian Croft
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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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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The longing and yearning for love and something more that takes place in the book!
- By Adam Rodriguez on 05-14-25
By: Seán Hewitt
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Bad Nature
- A Novel
- By: Ariel Courage
- Narrated by: Cia Court
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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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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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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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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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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Great Expectations Unrealized
- By Suzanna on 05-30-25
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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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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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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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Hellions
- stories
- By: Julia Elliott
- Narrated by: Suzy Jackson, Matt Godfrey
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript. In rural South Carolina, an alligator named Dragon becomes a beloved pet for a precocious, tough-talking twelve-year-old. During a long, muggy July, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film The Exorcist. On the outskirts of a Southern college town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills.
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Each story is better than the last
- By Anonymous User on 04-20-25
By: Julia Elliott
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Blonde Dust
- By: Tatiana de Rosnay
- Narrated by: Caroline Hewitt
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Pauline, a young chambermaid who works at the legendary Mapes Hotel in Reno, Nevada, is asked to step in for a colleague and clean Suite 614. Although she was told the rooms were empty, a dazed, sleepy woman appears before her. This is Mrs. Miller, aka Marilyn Monroe, whose stay in Reno coincides with the breakdown of her marriage to Arthur Miller and the filming of what was to be her last film, The Misfits.
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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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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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Francine's Spectacular Crash and Burn
- A Novel
- By: Renee Swindle
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Francine's Spectacular Crash and Burn is a bighearted novel that will wiggle its way into the heart of every listener. It follows Francine Stevenson. whose life revolved around her anxious agoraphobic mother—her abrupt passing rocks Francine to her core and sends her into a tailspin of depression. She copes by rummaging through her mother’s assortment of pills, dancing manically at night to the disco she and her mother enjoyed while keeping up appearances at work during daylight hours.
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"I was sad when it ended".
- By Susan Carpendale on 05-14-25
By: Renee Swindle
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Great Black Hope
- A Novel
- By: Rob Franklin
- Narrated by: Justice Smith, Rob Franklin
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not. It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend.
By: Rob Franklin
Excellent
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