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List Price: $39.95Price: $5.55 You Save: $34.40 (86%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Audio Cassette
Format: Bargain Price
Number Of Items: 8
Publication Date: September 01, 2000
Sales Rank: 1967217
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Performed by John Lee
Amazon.com Review:
When 9-year-old Christopher Banks's father--a British businessman involved in the opium trade--disappears from the family home in Shanghai, the boy and his friend Akira play at being detectives: "Until in the end, after the chases, fist-fights and gun-battles around the warren-like alleys of the Chinese districts, whatever our variations and elaborations, our narratives would always conclude with a magnificent ceremony held in Jessfield Park, a ceremony that would see us, one after another, step out onto a specially erected stage ... to greet the vast cheering crowds."
But Christopher's mother also disappears, and he is sent to live in England, where he grows up in the years between the world wars to become, he claims, a famous detective. His family's fate continues to haunt him, however, and he sifts through his memories to try to make sense of his loss. Finally, in the late 1930s, he returns to Shanghai to solve the most important case of his life. But as Christopher pursues his investigation, the boundaries between fact and fantasy begin to evaporate. Is the Japanese soldier he meets really Akira? Are his parents really being held in a house in the Chinese district? And who is Mr. Grayson, the British official who seems to be planning an important celebration? "My first question, sir, before anything else, is if you're happy with the choice of Jessfield Park for the ceremony? We will, you see, require substantial space."
In When We Were Orphans Kazuo Ishiguro uses the conventions of crime fiction to create a moving portrait of a troubled mind, and of a man who cannot escape the long shadows cast by childhood trauma. Sherlock Holmes needed only fragments--a muddy shoe, cigarette ash on a sleeve--to make his deductions, but all Christopher has are fading recollections of long-ago events, and for him the truth is much harder to grasp. Ishiguro writes in the first person, but from the beginning there are cracks in Christopher's carefully restrained prose, suggestions that his version of the world may not be the most reliable. Faced with such a narrator, the reader is forced to become a detective too, chasing crumbs of truth through the labyrinth of Christopher's memory.
Ishiguro has never been one for verbal pyrotechnics, but the unruffled surface of this haunting novel only adds to its emotional power. When We Were Orphans is an extraordinary feat of sustained, perfectly controlled imagination, and in Christopher Banks the author has created one of his most memorable characters. --Simon Leake
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
On numerous occasions, I was VERY impressed by Kazuo Ishiguro's writing. Sometimes, he uses words so effectively that I imagine his scenes with great detail and their images stay in the background of my mind for days. And sometimes he creates characters that leap off the page, that seem real and complex and simply fascinating to me. In this book, one of the characters was like this for me - Sarah Hemmings.
Unfortunately, the lead character and narrator, Christopher, was not like this ... Read More
Rating:  -
Another disappointment from Kazuo Ishiguro, and the fact that it was nominated for the Booker Prize shows how imbecilic literary fiction prizes are these days.
There were many annoying things within this novel, and chief among which is the protagonist Christopher is a passive idiot. Of course, Stevens from Remains of the Day was a passive idiot too, but Stevens was SUPPOSED be an idiot whereas Christopher is supposed to be a celebrated detective. This guy can't solve some kid stealing ... Read More
Rating: -
This was the first book of Ishiguro's that I've read and unfortunately it was disappointing.
The story begins with the premise of Christopher's remembered early life in Shanghai. Eventually we learn the story of his parents' disappearance as it is interwoven with his life as a London-based detective. Christopher's character starts out with promise-the flashbacks to his childhood are interesting and evocative. Unfortunately, the character becomes increasingly less dimensional and I, as ... Read More
Rating:  -
It's not just a case of Christopher Banks being an unreliable narrator. Kazuo Ishiguro is an unreliable author, and I mean that as a compliment.
Think of the book as a musical ... no one walks out of "Rent" complaining that the narrator was unreliable as people don't break into song. It's a convention.
Ishiguro has created a world in which detectives really are celebrated, where police and governments are eager to work them, and where there are enough celebrated detectives that ... Read More
Rating:  -
I entered into this book with very high expectations for obvious reasons: Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go are examples of outstanding fiction. When We Were Orphans is not. It starts in a very compelling and beautiful manner with the intertwining of Banks' current and childhood life, but things start to really unravel when he returns to his childhood Shanghai to solve his parents disappearance (hence title). There are so many ludicrous gaps in common sense in the back third of the book, it becomes a ... Read More
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