-
Strange Beasts of China
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 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 $34.99
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
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
-
Velvet Was the Night
- By: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- Narrated by: Gisela Chípe
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mexico in the 1970s is a dangerous country, even for Maite, a secretary who spends her life seeking the romance found in cheap comic books and ignoring the activists protesting around the city. When her next-door neighbor, the beautiful art student Leonora, disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman—and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents.
-
-
Amazing, entertaining, and insightful
- By Mogopolis on 09-07-21
-
When We Cease to Understand the World
- By: Benjamin Labatut, Adrian West - translator
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence.
-
-
Phenomenal Stories About Ultra Geniuses
- By Z on 12-08-21
By: Benjamin Labatut, and others
-
The Immortal King Rao
- By: Vauhini Vara
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government. In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy—literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts.
-
-
Excellent story, narration mostly good
- By Kirty Prabhakar on 07-20-22
By: Vauhini Vara
-
The Anomaly
- A Novel
- By: Hervé Le Tellier, Adriana Hunter - translator
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In June 2021, a senseless event upends the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man, though he works as a contract killer; Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star tired of living a lie; Joanna, a formidable lawyer whose flaws have caught up with her; and Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful writer who suddenly becomes a cult hit. All of them believed they had double lives. None imagined just how true that was.
-
-
Good sci-fi but myopic
- By Pete on 11-25-21
By: Hervé Le Tellier, and others
-
Sea of Tranquility
- A Novel
- By: Emily St. John Mandel
- Narrated by: John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty.
-
-
An excellent listen.
- By Mark on 04-11-22
-
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
-
Velvet Was the Night
- By: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- Narrated by: Gisela Chípe
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mexico in the 1970s is a dangerous country, even for Maite, a secretary who spends her life seeking the romance found in cheap comic books and ignoring the activists protesting around the city. When her next-door neighbor, the beautiful art student Leonora, disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman—and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents.
-
-
Amazing, entertaining, and insightful
- By Mogopolis on 09-07-21
-
When We Cease to Understand the World
- By: Benjamin Labatut, Adrian West - translator
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence.
-
-
Phenomenal Stories About Ultra Geniuses
- By Z on 12-08-21
By: Benjamin Labatut, and others
-
The Immortal King Rao
- By: Vauhini Vara
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government. In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy—literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts.
-
-
Excellent story, narration mostly good
- By Kirty Prabhakar on 07-20-22
By: Vauhini Vara
-
The Anomaly
- A Novel
- By: Hervé Le Tellier, Adriana Hunter - translator
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In June 2021, a senseless event upends the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man, though he works as a contract killer; Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star tired of living a lie; Joanna, a formidable lawyer whose flaws have caught up with her; and Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful writer who suddenly becomes a cult hit. All of them believed they had double lives. None imagined just how true that was.
-
-
Good sci-fi but myopic
- By Pete on 11-25-21
By: Hervé Le Tellier, and others
-
Sea of Tranquility
- A Novel
- By: Emily St. John Mandel
- Narrated by: John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty.
-
-
An excellent listen.
- By Mark on 04-11-22
-
Lapvona
- A Novel
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be.
-
-
Hideous violence
- By Joan Sutton on 07-05-22
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
-
Light Perpetual
- A Novel
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: The Woolworths on Bexford High Street in South London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages - after all, everything’s been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.
-
-
Outstanding... breathtaking
- By klstickel on 06-05-21
By: Francis Spufford
-
Matrix
- A Novel
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her.
-
-
Wonderful story well written and narratives
- By ReallyNelie on 09-25-21
By: Lauren Groff
-
Companion Piece
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Natalie Simpson
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With an eye for rendering the timely in a timeless way and enchanting audiences with lyrical prose and grace, Ali Smith's ambitious Seasonal Quartet—a series of four stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected—artfully guided us through #MeToo, Brexit, the refugee crisis, a global pandemic, and more. Now, Smith's highly anticipated Companion Piece looks to the future and builds upon this "time-sensitive project". This new novel stands apart from the Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself.
-
-
You have to read it at least twice
- By Mounties on 06-29-22
By: Ali Smith
-
The Island of Missing Trees
- A Novel
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Daphne Kouma, Amira Ghazalla
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish.
-
-
Beautifully woven tale
- By KR on 11-24-21
By: Elif Shafak
-
The Candy House
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer Egan
- Narrated by: Michael Boatman, Nicole Lewis, Thomas Sadoski, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory.
-
-
She did it again!! Love it!
- By Monica on 04-07-22
By: Jennifer Egan
-
Bewilderment
- A Novel
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son, Robin, is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from third grade for smashing his friend's face with a metal thermos.
-
-
Not Usually a Richard Powers Fan
- By Billy on 09-28-21
By: Richard Powers
-
The Books of Jacob
- A Novel
- By: Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft - translator
- Narrated by: Allen Lewis Rickman, Gilli Messer
- Length: 35 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the mid-18th century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following.
-
-
A notorious false messiah and his followers
- By Shmuel M on 02-25-22
By: Olga Tokarczuk, and others
-
Afterparties
- Stories
- By: Anthony Veasna So
- Narrated by: Jason Sean
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.
-
-
Good stories bad reader
- By Nancy go on 09-05-21
-
The Neil Gaiman Reader
- Fiction
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Neil Gaiman, George Guidall, Lenny Henry, and others
- Length: 27 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Spanning Gaiman’s career to date, The Neil Gaiman Reader: Selected Fiction is a captivating collection from one of the world’s most beloved writers, chosen by those who know his work best: his devoted fans. A brilliant representation of Gaiman's groundbreaking, entrancing, endlessly imaginative fiction, this captivating volume includes excerpts from each of his five novels for adults—Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane—and nearly fifty of his short stories.
-
-
Love Gaiman but little new material
- By The nurse who... on 10-22-20
By: Neil Gaiman
-
Searching for Sylvie Lee
- A Novel
- By: Jean Kwok
- Narrated by: Angela Lin, Samantha Quan, Caroline McLaughlin
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A poignant and suspenseful drama that untangles the complicated ties binding three women - two sisters and their mother - in one Chinese immigrant family and explores what happens when the eldest daughter disappears, and a series of family secrets emerge, from the New York Times best-selling author of Girl in Translation.
-
-
Entertaining for a bit, but is worst book ever!
- By Becky on 09-04-19
By: Jean Kwok
-
Joan Is Okay
- A Novel
- By: Weike Wang
- Narrated by: Catherine Ho
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joan is a 30-something ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the United States to secure the American dream for their children, Joan is intensely devoted to her work. She does look up sometimes and wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own expectations. But when Joan’s father suddenly dies and her mother returns to America to reconnect with her children, a series of events sends Joan spiraling out of her comfort zone.
-
-
Loved it!
- By Yvonne on 01-26-22
By: Weike Wang
Publisher's Summary
In the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness - save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self. Part detective story, part metaphysical enquiry, Strange Beasts of China engages existential questions of identity, humanity, love, and morality with whimsy and stylistic verve.
More from the same
What listeners say about Strange Beasts of China
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- jinxologue
- 09-20-21
Snooze!
Dear God, this book was so boring. Ridiculously boring.. Poor character development and virtually no plot. And the narration is really annoying. I can't believe I bought both the hardcover and audio book versions. That was a waste of money and time. Actually, that's not entirely true -- it was useful as a sleep aid at nights.
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Brianna
- 11-30-21
Masterfully Woven - Imaginative and Meditative!
Interesting fantasy/fiction story laden with thought-provoking caricatures of human nature. The writing is beautiful and geometrical. The structuring of the story is dynamic and fun – carefully weaving how the reader assimilates this spontaneous and imaginative journey through its plot and characters,
I was overjoyed to find Emily Woo Zeller as the narrator. She did a fantastic job on this story, and is always a good narrator who is enjoyable to listen to.
All around, great read and listen for fans of this genre - and anyone who enjoys a good story that provides you with any level of depth you choose!