Ha Jin's wry and sentimental novel, winner of this year's National Book Award, is set during the most rigid and doctrinaire of the Mao years in China. Lin Kong and Manna Wu work together and love each other for 17 years, never able to touch, waiting while Lin Kong tries to find a way of divorcing the wife he left back in his village. Hill matches the ease, directness, and seeming simplicity of Ha Jin's narrative, but he falters in his delivery of female dialogue, the undoing of many male narrators. Over the course of the novel's nine hours, however, he falls more and more under the novel's spell, as the reader does, while Ha Jin's hopeless love triangle unfolds in his lucid, unaffected, and wonderfully balanced sentences.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2000
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Ayla, one of the "others," is adopted by a clan of Neanderthal cave people. She struggles to conform to their ways, but her advanced human traits overwhelm and threaten their primitive culture in this initial installment of an immensely popular series. Although the story might benefit from abridgment, Rowena Cooper easily carries out the formidable task of enlivening the mostly silent and stereotypical characters with consistent, diverse personalities and human dimension. Through skillful phrasing and inflection, she maintains the reader's interest and suspense, especially with Ayla and her plight, throughout this rambling and imaginative story.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 22 hrs
Publisher: BBC Audiobooks America/ Chivers
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
This lyrical, sensual novel of woman's lot in Manchu, China, is as well researched as it is well written. Authentic in tone, it's nonetheless written for Westerners by a Western expert on China. Moreover, Susan Clark performs the demanding text superbly, with only occasional signs of fatigue. For the most part she not only sustains the quaint diction and Asian atmosphere, but also, creates whole worlds with her voice. She acts the book, rather than reads it, and, in so doing, turns a pretty trifle into a stupendous beauty.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 4 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Audio Literature
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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