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Vanishing World
- Author
- Sayaka Murata
- Narrator
- Nancy Wu
- Publisher
- Granta Books
- Publish Date
- 24 April 2025
- Run Time
- 5 hours 48 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
- Rating
- 4.0 (1 review)
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What to expect
Critics Review
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Makes the ordinary world as we see it look strange again... Publishers will continue to seek out imitations of [Sayaka's] vision - but why bother, when the real thing is so good?
Financial Times
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In the imagination of Sayaka Murata, nothing seems to be off limits... Like The Handmaid's Tale on acid... Murata deploys both visceral language and body horror to convey Amane's lust... It invites us to consider how reproductive gender equality could transform society, with chilling ramifications
New York Times
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Japanese fiction leads a boom in translated novels and Murata is its queen, striking a chord around the world with her weird tales of urban alienation under patriarchy and capitalism... Fit to burst with eye-popping twists and conceits... A typically wild ride
Daily Mail
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Vanishing World could not have arrived at a more fitting moment, given the Trump administrations' preoccupation with women's bodily autonomy... Murata's brilliantly unsettling ending will leave you reeling and questioning your own beliefs
Stylist
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Japan's answer to Brave New World... Murata has the uncanny prescience of the best sci-fi writers
Daily Telegraph
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Quirky and thought-provoking
Grazia
User Reviews
Book 4.0
Narration 5.0
- No written reviews yet.
Details
- Author
- Sayaka Murata
- Narrator
- Nancy Wu
- Duration
- 5 hours 48 minutes
- Release Date
- 24 April 2025
- ISBN
- 9781803512952
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Granta Books
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary, Fiction in translation
- Rating
- 4.0(1 review)
- Narration
- 5.0(1 review)
Synopsis
Amane is ten years old when she discovers she's not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in 'clean', sexless marriages. But Amane's parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can't help questioning what sex and marriage are for. But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?
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