-
Disappearing Earth
- A novel
- Narrated by: Ilyana Kadushin
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $28.00
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Lincoln Highway
- A Novel
- By: Amor Towles
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland, Dion Graham
- Length: 16 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car.
-
-
I'm totally opposite
- By Meaghan Bynum on 10-10-21
By: Amor Towles
-
Hamnet
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Ell Potter
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
-
-
A masterpiece
- By Molly-o on 08-03-20
By: Maggie O'Farrell
-
Klara and the Sun
- A Novel
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Sura Siu
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: What does it mean to love?
-
-
Well Worth Having Waited For!
- By otherdeb on 03-04-21
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
-
Cloud Cuckoo Land
- A Novel
- By: Anthony Doerr
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland, Simon Jones
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Among the most celebrated and beloved novels of 2021, Anthony Doerr’s gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone.
-
-
Academic Snobbery
- By TVR on 10-03-21
By: Anthony Doerr
-
The Midnight Library
- A Novel
- By: Matt Haig
- Narrated by: Carey Mulligan
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision.
-
-
Predictable from the Very START
- By James Robert Nash on 10-28-20
By: Matt Haig
-
The Night Watchman
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Louise Erdrich
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, DC, this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
-
-
Beautiful
- By Melanie on 03-09-20
By: Louise Erdrich
-
The Lincoln Highway
- A Novel
- By: Amor Towles
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland, Dion Graham
- Length: 16 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car.
-
-
I'm totally opposite
- By Meaghan Bynum on 10-10-21
By: Amor Towles
-
Hamnet
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Ell Potter
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
-
-
A masterpiece
- By Molly-o on 08-03-20
By: Maggie O'Farrell
-
Klara and the Sun
- A Novel
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Sura Siu
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: What does it mean to love?
-
-
Well Worth Having Waited For!
- By otherdeb on 03-04-21
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
-
Cloud Cuckoo Land
- A Novel
- By: Anthony Doerr
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland, Simon Jones
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Among the most celebrated and beloved novels of 2021, Anthony Doerr’s gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone.
-
-
Academic Snobbery
- By TVR on 10-03-21
By: Anthony Doerr
-
The Midnight Library
- A Novel
- By: Matt Haig
- Narrated by: Carey Mulligan
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision.
-
-
Predictable from the Very START
- By James Robert Nash on 10-28-20
By: Matt Haig
-
The Night Watchman
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Louise Erdrich
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, DC, this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
-
-
Beautiful
- By Melanie on 03-09-20
By: Louise Erdrich
-
The Four Winds
- A Novel
- By: Kristin Hannah
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she barely knows.
-
-
✫✫ 4.75 Stars ✫✫
- By ❤️Cyndi Marie❤️🎧Audiobook Addicts🎧 on 02-03-21
By: Kristin Hannah
-
The Vanishing Half
- A Novel
- By: Brit Bennett
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, Southern Black community and running away at age 16, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: Their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for White, and her White husband knows nothing of her past.
-
-
Soap opera material
- By Sheila S on 06-06-20
By: Brit Bennett
-
Crossroads
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 24 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads. A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen’s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.
-
-
How do narrators still do clownish stuff like this in 2021?
- By Hotrodimus on 10-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
-
Writers & Lovers
- A Novel
- By: Lily King
- Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she has been writing for six years. At 31, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life.
-
-
An absorbing listen
- By Barbara S on 03-08-20
By: Lily King
-
No One Is Talking About This
- A Novel
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void.
-
-
Funny, moving, glad to have read it
- By Terra on 05-26-21
-
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
- A Novel
- By: Olga Tokarczuk, Antonia Lloyd-Jones
- Narrated by: Beata Pozniak
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then, a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon, other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind....
-
-
A Haunting Performance
- By M&M on 09-11-19
By: Olga Tokarczuk, and others
-
Transcendent Kingdom
- A Novel
- By: Yaa Gyasi
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.
-
-
Would have benefited from a different narrator
- By Richard Stewart on 09-11-20
By: Yaa Gyasi
-
Lost Children Archive
- A Novel
- By: Valeria Luiselli
- Narrated by: Valeria Luiselli, Kivlighan de Montebello, William DeMeritt, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home. Why Apaches? asks the 10-year-old son. Because they were the last of something,answers his father. In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an "immigration crisis": thousands of kids trying to cross the Southwestern border into the US but getting detained - or lost in the desert along the way.
-
-
Ground Control to Major Tom
- By Nicole Del Sesto on 07-21-19
By: Valeria Luiselli
-
The Sentence
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Louise Erdrich
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention", must solve the mystery of this haunting.
-
-
Addictive and surprising
- By Amazon Customer on 11-25-21
By: Louise Erdrich
-
Long Bright River
- A Novel
- By: Liz Moore
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling. Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit - and her sister - before it's too late.
-
-
Has no heft
- By Marion on 01-15-20
By: Liz Moore
-
Oh William!
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Strout
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 7 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us.
-
-
My God, this is dull
- By Rhonda Morrison on 10-20-21
By: Elizabeth Strout
-
The Promise
- By: Damon Galgut
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
-
-
Excellent novel
- By ALG on 11-09-21
By: Damon Galgut
Publisher's Summary
One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
National Book Award Finalist
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award
National Best Seller
"Splendidly imagined... Thrilling" (Simon Winchester)
"A genuine masterpiece" (Gary Shteyngart)
Spellbinding, moving - evoking a fascinating region on the other side of the world - this suspenseful and haunting story announces the debut of a profoundly gifted writer.
One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls - sisters, eight and 11 - go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.
Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty - densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska - and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.
In a story as propulsive as it is emotionally engaging, and through a young writer's virtuosic feat of empathy and imagination, this powerful novel brings us to a new understanding of the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.
Critic Reviews
“Mesmerizing.... The mystery of two sisters’ disappearance alternately ebbs and intensifies over the course of a year, [as] each chapter dips into the life of a different girl or woman [on] Kamchatka. The story reads as a page-turner without relying on any cheap narrative tricks to propel it forward, and the strength of Phillips’s writing - her careful attention to character and tone - will grip you right up until the final heart-stopping pages.” (Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair)
“Accomplished and gripping.... The volcano-spiked Kamchatka Peninsula in Far East Russia, where the tundra still supports herds of reindeer and the various Native groups who depend on them, is the evocative setting of Phillips’ novel. In fresh and unpredictable scenes depicting broken friendships and failed marriages, strained family gatherings, and rehearsals of a Native dance troupe, Phillips’ spellbinding prose is saturated with sensuous nuance and emotional intensity, as she subtly traces the shadows of Russia’s past and illuminates today’s daunting complexities of gender and identity, expectations and longing.” (Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review)
“A superb debut - brilliant. Daring, nearly flawless. A crime jump-starts Disappearing Earth; the novel exposes the ways in which the women of Kamchatka are fragmented not only by [a] kidnapping, but by place [and] identity...Phillips describes the region with a cartographer’s precision and an ethnographer’s clarity, drawing an emblematic cast.... There will be those eager to designate Disappearing Earth a thriller by focusing on the whodunit rather than what the tragedy reveals about the women in and around it. Phillips’ deep examination of loss and longing is a testament to the novel’s power.” (Ivy Pochoda, The New York Times Book Review)
More from the same
Author
Narrator
What listeners say about Disappearing Earth
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- egarc024
- 03-04-20
Terrible Narration
Couldn’t get past the narrator. She makes everything, and I mean everything sound suspenseful. Banana crepe you say? She makes the crepe sound like it murdered someone.
9 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Julie
- 01-18-20
Did not finish—too many POV's
This is beautifully written, but unfortunately, just didn't work for me. I didn't realize that this was essentially a collection of short stories. The POV changed with each chapter, making it hard for me to both connect with the story, and to keep track of what was supposed to be important. It was basically just a bunch of snapshots into all these different lives... people who were only loosely connected to the disappearance of the girls. It wasn't as though you were getting a full picture of the crime through the different perspectives, either, since the disappearance itself was barely even mentioned. It was just that. Random snippets from random people around town.
I suspect that at some point the author will draw them all together, and HOPEFULLY things will make sense in one great "A-ha!" moment. But I just can't wait that long. I'm bored, and this author officially lost me.
8 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Michaels
- 03-03-20
Tedious
This was tedious, tedious, tedious. No way to connect with any of the characters - most are in a chapter and you may never hear from them again. And narrator has no ability to change voices so it sounds like all one run-on character until you figure out it’s a whole new character with another Russian name. I didn’t enjoy even a minute of this book. And - spoiler alert - there isn’t even any real closure. I hung in there hoping for some satisfying resolution at the end, but there hardly was. Don’t waste your time.
7 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kelly
- 06-25-19
The setting is completely unique!
I entered this one expecting a dark and deeply sad mystery novel, but I got something that was so much more. There was a lot about this book that I loved and one of the primary things was the setting. I knew nothing about the Kamchatka peninsula and I found the culture of it and the isolation caused by its geography extremely interesting. 30 years ago I minored in Russian and Russian studies. As part of one course I completed a project on the reindeer herding indigenous people featured in this book, which made the book even more fun, though I was sad to see the same prejudices against these natives of Russia that we deal with against the natives of the USA.
In Disappearing Earth two young girls, sisters who are eight and eleven years old, go missing. The police are quickly called to investigate but they find nothing. The only evidence is an unreliable and minimal description of the girls in a car. They are just gone. Without a trace.
One of the things that worked best in this one is the structure of the book. Each chapter focuses on a different character and takes place in consecutive months after the girls' disappearance. Over the course of a year we are slowly let into the mindset of a witness, a detective, and several others. The final chapter is focusing on the mother of the two girls. The story is moving and sad, and I kept hoping that the mother's grief and worry would end. I am a mom, and these types of stories are difficult to take.
The ending was especially good. It was a big pay off for investing in the story.
14 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- ~Portia
- 05-24-19
Beautifully written
This was a great listen. Wonderful character development through vignettes of lives that intertwine while a mystery unfolds. My only criticism is I felt like I needed a chart to keep track of everyone and how they related to one another. Looking forward to listening to it again to connect all the dots.
14 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- 333smilee
- 04-25-20
What is going on?...
Okay so the beginning was promising, but I don’t know if maybe this is a story that would be better followed by actually reading it yourself. The narrator was okay, but didn’t really captivate me into the story. But at the end of the day I think it was the writing that was the problem. I very, very rarely give up on a book, but I just couldn’t follow along. Bummer
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- sci-fi nerd
- 06-30-19
What a madly moving novel
What an odd feeling, to have such a subdued book impact me in such a powerful way. There's still so much I don't understand, yet I feel like I just lived an emotionally exhausting week among the struggling yet strong Russian women of this novel.
Perhaps I'm so overwhelmed because the main character of Disappearing Earth was not a person, but rather an entire place and culture.
Kamchatka is a small remote peninsula in the Russian Far East, about the size of California and not far from Alaska. I suggest investigating the history of this rugged area and its native peoples before picking up this novel. A little understanding up front might help you appreciate how the disappearance of a couple young girls could so fully impact an entire tundra region.
As well, the construction of this book is unique and difficult to embrace if you're not expecting it. It offers a month-by-month view into the lives of different woman who live in Kamchatka. You are not supposed to find any connection between these women beyond where they live (not until the very end of the book, anyway). We see how each one survives everyday life, facing the savage weather, the bravado of the men, the racism against indigenous peoples by the mainland Russians who emigrated there, and the all-too-common financial struggles. It's a fascinating succession of short stories exposing the culture of this remote community, tied together by one event that rippled through and affected each of them in powerful ways.
I admit I don't know enough about the (pre-collapse) Soviet Union, but all the references to "before" that were made have me aching to find out more about the then and now of Russian culture. That's the kind of book I love most: one that makes me wonder and question, and inspires me to learn more.
14 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kristin
- 07-06-19
More like a book of short stories
This book is like a necklace of beads, with just a very thin thread holding them together. Unfortunately, that’s not what I personally want from a novel. I don’t mind multiple points of view and intertwining stories at all—but I want those individual stories to be more like ribbons, with just a limited number of them elegantly braided together.
There are just way too many voices in this story. Each vignette is very well written, and the way they all do connect is impressive. But it felt relentless, one after the other, having to meet new characters and get inside their heads, only to abandon most of them completely. If the author had included just half the number of characters and had spent more time going deeper into their stories, and if she had developed the core mystery with as much care as she approached open-ended character studies, I probably would have loved this book.
7 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- mike myers
- 06-12-19
Annoying story
Several times I considered giving up on this book because it was so annoying with all the rabbit holes which had nothing to do with the main storyline. I kept wondering if there were clues being revealed but it was just overboard character building or to get across how the person felt. It just went on and on and then there was this abrupt ending. I don't know if the author believed there was only one possible outcome and so there was no reason to tell it or she expected the listener to decide it. It is 20 minute short story about some abductions and about 11 hour story of A Day In The Lives Of Various Russian Women (soap opera).
11 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Susan
- 05-26-19
A story about a crime, yes, but not traditional detective story.
A masterly novel that made me want to go back and start reading it again as soon as I had finished it.
A tremendous debut. I can’t wait for her next one!
9 people found this helpful