When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro

Written by Kazuo Ishiguro
Read by John Lee
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: HarperAudio
Release date: June 21, 2005
Duration: 10:53:40

A masterful novel from one of the most admired writers of our time.

Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early-20th-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when both his mother and father disappear under suspicious circumstances. He grows up to become a renowned detective, and more than 20 years later, returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of the disappearances.

Within the layers of the narrative told in Christopher’s precise, slightly detached voice are revealed what he can’t, or wont, see: that the simplest desires—a child’s for his parents, a man’s for understanding—may give rise to the most complicated truths.

A feat of narrative skill and soaring imagination, When We Were Orphans is Kazuo Ishiguro at his brilliant best.

“John Lee conveys both Banks’s intelligence and his uneasy depths in this fine performance, which far surpasses the print version as a reading experience. Lee’s witty multi-accented reading of tony British and pidgin Chinese brings to life a sometimes-stodgy narrative, and gives an edge to Ishiguro’s sometimes too subtle humor. The reserved, punctiliously grammatical narrator, a first cousin to the butler-narrator of The Remains of the Day, here again offers a dramatic contrast to the backdrop of the times–the Japanese siege of Shanghai in 1937; the growing unrest and uncertainty of a world moving toward war; and the romance, courage, and resolve so identified with that era.”—AudioFile