When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (2000, Unabridged, Audio Cassette)

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 won't 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

Industry Reviews
"Ishiguro has chosen a careful Edwardian prose for his detective-hero; but he seems reluctant to establish a sharp or noticeable comic distance from it. It's like P. G. Wodehouse without jokes. His story insists that we sympathize with his orphans; his style refuses to let us. The result is an uneasy calm between crosscurrents. [I]t goes without saying that the novel is thoroughly artful and well orchestrated. But it does feel as though a distinguished author has found himself in the wrong lane here...."
Literary Review - Robert Winder (04/20/2000)

"WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS is as intricately plotted as a conventional mystery novel....[It] will linger in the mind as an often fascinating, imaginative work of surpassing intelligence and taste."
Times Literary Supplement - Joyce Carol Oates (03/31/2000)

"There's more than a touch of Kafka in WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS....[T]hings just keep getting queerer as the story goes on, until you start to wonder whether the world contained in the book is more fanciful than it seems, or whether it's going to be revealed at some juncture that Banks is actually writing his memoirs from the day-room of some sort of mental institution. [But] it doesn't end with enough of a Kafkaesque, mythopoetic wallop to make the surprise worth wringing your hands over. The reason to read the book is Ishiguro's gorgeous, perhaps matchless, prose."
Salon (09/19/2000)

"Though ORPHANS has moments of enormous power, it lacks the virtuosic control of language that made REMAINS OF THE DAY such a tour de force....Indeed it remains a messy hybrid of a book....Though Mr. Ishiguro's description of Christopher's search for his parents through a war-ravaged neighborhood in Shanghai is a harrowing piece of writing..., such set pieces do not add up to a persuasive novel."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (09/19/2000)

"WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS is intelligent and arresting, but in the end Ishiguro takes on more than he can handle. When the book moves from England to China, when Ishiguro brings to the fore the themes he has carefully nurtured, events and people become too programmatic and, at times, implausible....The canvas here is far larger than the one Ishiguro employed in THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Yet the book itself somehow seems smaller, a calculated exercise rather than a story developing with its own narrative force and internal logic. One can admire the intelligence and ingenuity of the exercise, as indeed I do, yet can wish as well that its heart were as large as its brain."
Washington Post Book World - Jonathan Yardley (09/10/2000)