
The Book of M
A Novel
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Buy Now for $43.11
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Narrated by:
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James Fouhey
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Emily Woo Zeller
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Written by:
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Peng Shepherd
About this listen
Set in a dangerous near-future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself.
One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears - an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.
Ory and his wife, Max, have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day, Max’s shadow disappears, too.
Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.
As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.
Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.
©2018 Peng Shepherd (P)2018 HarperCollins PublishersFeatured Article: 20 Best Sci-Fi Audiobooks for Exploring New Worlds
There is no genre that lends itself better to audio narrative than Science Fiction does. There is a magic that transports listeners to new worlds of wonder and mystery that is heightened by expert voice actors and narrators. A great writer can create an imaginative new world or dystopian civilisation, but it is up to the narrator to bring this world to life around you. We’ve gathered together 20 of the top science fiction audiobooks ranked not only for their stories but for the emotive and compelling narrative performances. Let these award winning tales and voices carry you away to worlds unknown.
Good
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Poignant in a COVID sense.
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To the narrators...well done!
Unique and original - a great read/listen
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Engaging
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Emily Woo Zeller was difficult to listen to. I get that the story calls for Max to be read in certain tone, but almost all of her reading was done while whining and crying. Also, it was very annoying that whoever edited this did not tell either Emily or James (narrators) to pronounce Gajarajan the same way.
Story:
The first half of this story was pretty much another overdone zombie apocalypse in disguise - except without most of the intensity that makes those interesting.
On a side note: objects still have shadows, none of these people are running around in the nude meaning their clothing’s shadow would still show. How could people identify clothed shadowless so easily?
The worst part of the book was when Ory hears about a sign that had something etched into it. “Maybe 50, or 20-something?” Nah, it couldn’t be 52 - literally the only thing that he and Max used to show she remembered. Let’s move on without checking it out.
This book didn’t make me feel connected with any of the characters, except perhaps The One Who Gathers - who I was hoping would be an interesting villain, but turned out to be just another boring character.
I’ll give it 2 stars since there were some interesting new concepts in the book, but I think it was executed poorly.
Poor narration of a below-average story. Some spoilers.
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Disappointing
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Wildly farfetched in a non-sensical in way that still asks to be taken seriously. Silly, predictable and meandering but SO painfully unaware of that fact.
Not for fans of hard sci-fi or socially relevant speculative fiction.
It reads like a 7 year old explaining a cartoon to an adult. "then, there's this thing where everyone loses their shadow, and also they forget stuff, and then there's magic but you cant like control it and there's like some stuff you can make if you remember it like a big storm and then this guy has an elephant shadow who can reattach lost shadows and there's a bad guy who is red and has a book dungeon". It's not fun, not heartfelt, boring, unlikable characters.
The audiobook is somewhat tolerable but I found Max's voice poorly acted and cloying, same overwrought delivery every single line.
NOT for people with a low tolerance for non-sense
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