We look forward to seeing you on your next visit to the library. Find a location near you.

When We Were Orphans
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)

Book Cover
Average Rating
5 star
 
(1)
4 star
 
(1)
3 star
 
(1)
2 star
 
(2)
1 star
 
(0)
Author:
Narrator:
Published:
HarperAudio 2005
Lexile measure:
1030L
Status:
Checked Out
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

Also in This Series
Formats
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
Works on MP3 Players, PCs, and Macs. Some mobile devices may require an application to be installed.
OverDrive Listen
Need Help?
If you are having problem transferring a title to your device, please fill out this support form or visit the library so we can help you to use our eBooks and eAudio Books.
More Like This
Other Editions and Formats
More Copies In LINK+
Loading LINK+ Copies...
More Details
Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
06/21/2005
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780060854317
Lexile measure:
1030
Reviews from GoodReads
Loading GoodReads Reviews.
Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Kazuo Ishiguro. (2005). When We Were Orphans. Unabridged HarperAudio.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Kazuo Ishiguro. 2005. When We Were Orphans. HarperAudio.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans. HarperAudio, 2005.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Kazuo Ishiguro. When We Were Orphans. Unabridged HarperAudio, 2005.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
Copy Details
LibraryOwnedAvailable
Shared Digital Collection20
Staff View
Grouped Work ID:
ceeaf3ff-b2fa-0e38-5327-62e2820d19d2
Go To Grouped Work
Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 16:11:11
Date Updated:
Jun 12, 2018 16:11:11
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 24, 2024 07:34:42
Last Metadata Change:
Aug 19, 2023 11:40:22
Last Availability Check:
Mar 24, 2024 07:34:44
Last Availability Change:
Mar 22, 2024 16:26:52
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
Mar 29, 2024 02:17:20

OverDrive Product Record

sortTitle
When We Were Orphans
crossRefId
2396927
images
    • cover:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0293-1/{61DA6E05-6AA8-4651-8BB7-8FF82DAD6E08}Img100.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • thumbnail:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0293-1/{61DA6E05-6AA8-4651-8BB7-8FF82DAD6E08}Img200.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • cover150Wide:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0293-1/61D/A6E/05/{61DA6E05-6AA8-4651-8BB7-8FF82DAD6E08}Img150.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • cover300Wide:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0293-1/61D/A6E/05/{61DA6E05-6AA8-4651-8BB7-8FF82DAD6E08}Img400.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
formats
      • identifiers:
            • type: ISBN
            • value: 9780060854317
      • name: OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
      • id: audiobook-mp3
      • identifiers:
            • type: ISBN
            • value: 9780060854317
      • name: OverDrive Listen
      • id: audiobook-overdrive
mediaType
Audiobook
primaryCreator
    • role: Author
    • name: Kazuo Ishiguro
id
61da6e05-6aa8-4651-8bb7-8ff82dad6e08
title
When We Were Orphans
starRating
3.8
dateAdded
2017-12-14T18:28:00-05:00
contentDetails
      • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=2396927
      • type: text/html
      • account:
          • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
          • id: 1151

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain
False
formats
      • duration: 10:53:35
      • fileName: WhenWeWereOrphans_9780060854317_2396927
      • partCount: 9
      • fileSize: 313809868
      • identifiers:
            • type: ISBN
            • value: 9780060854317
      • rights:
            • type: PlayOnPC
            • value: 1
            • type: PlayOnPCCount
            • value: -1
            • type: BurnToCD
            • value: 1
            • type: BurnToCDCount
            • value: -1
            • type: PlayOnPM
            • value: 1
            • type: TransferToSDMI
            • value: 1
            • type: TransferToNonSDMI
            • value: 1
            • type: TransferCount
            • value: -1
            • type: CollaborativePlay
            • value: 0
            • type: PublicPerformance
            • value: 0
            • type: TranscodeToAAC
            • value: 1
      • name: OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
      • isReadAlong: False
      • id: audiobook-mp3
      • onSaleDate: 6/21/2005
      • samples:
            • source: Part 1
            • formatType: audiobook-mp3
            • url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-425/0293-1/2396927-WhenWeWereOrphans.mp3
            • source: From the book
            • formatType: audiobook-overdrive
            • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=61da6e05-6aa8-4651-8bb7-8ff82dad6e08&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
      • duration: 10:53:40
      • fileName: WhenWeWereOrphans-3894
      • partCount: 0
      • fileSize: 313762790
      • identifiers:
            • type: ISBN
            • value: 9780060854317
      • name: OverDrive Listen
      • isReadAlong: False
      • id: audiobook-overdrive
      • onSaleDate: 6/21/2005
      • samples:
            • source: Part 1
            • formatType: audiobook-mp3
            • url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-425/0293-1/2396927-WhenWeWereOrphans.mp3
            • source: From the book
            • formatType: audiobook-overdrive
            • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=61da6e05-6aa8-4651-8bb7-8ff82dad6e08&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
creators
      • role: Author
      • fileAs: Ishiguro, Kazuo
      • bioText: Kazuo Ishiguro is thw author of four previous novels, including TheRemains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize, and An Artist of the Floating World, which won the Whitbread Award. He lives in London.
      • name: Kazuo Ishiguro
      • role: Narrator
      • fileAs: Lee, John
      • name: John Lee
imprint
HarperAudio
publishDate
2005-06-21T00:00:00-04:00
edition
Unabridged
isOwnedByCollections
True
title
When We Were Orphans
fullDescription

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

reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: AudioFile Magazine
      • content: Christopher Banks, the great London detective who narrates Ishiguro's fifth novel, speaks with an elegance and reserve that personifies the 1930s, when great detectives were celebrated and revered figures. But Banks has a mystery in his own past the disappearance of his parents in Shanghai 20 years earlier, when he was only 9. John Lee conveys both Banks's intelligence and his uneasy depths in this fine performance, which far surpasses the print version as a reading experience. Lee's witty multi-accented reading of tony British and pidgin Chinese brings to life a sometimes stodgy narrative, and gives an edge to Ishiguro's sometimes too subtle humor. The reserved, punctiliously grammatical narrator, a first cousin to the butler-narrator of The Remains of the Day, here again offers a dramatic contrast to the backdrop of the times--the Japanese siege of Shanghai in 1937; the growing unrest and uncertainty of a world moving toward war; and the romance, courage, and resolve so identified with that era. D.A.W.
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        September 4, 2000
        Despite some contrived events and a tendency to rework the characterizations and themes of his previous books, Ishiguro's latest novel triumphs with the seductiveness of his prose and his ability to invigorate shadowy events with sinister implications. Like all of Ishiguro's protagonists, the narrator, here a recent Cambridge graduate named Christopher Banks, is an emotionally detached man who hides his real feelings from himself and who passively endures being trapped in nightmarish settings that give him "a grave foreboding." Like the hero of The Unconsoled, Christopher is bewildered by "the assumption shared by everyone... that it was somehow my sole responsibility to resolve the crisis." The crisis here is nothing less than averting WWII, which shares priority in Christopher's mind with the disappearance of his parents in Shanghai in the early 1900s, when he was nine years old. Christopher is sent to school in England, where he first formulates his dream of becoming a famous detective, an objective he achieves at a young age. Though he is convinced that his parents are still alive and that he can find them, he doesn't return to Shanghai until 1937, when he is in his mid 30s. It's obvious to the reader that Christopher deludes himself about many things, such as his conviction that when he "roots out evil," he is "cleansing the world of wickedness." This inclination toward grandiosity is a direct result of Christopher's sense of powerlessness as an orphan. While he is unaware of the connection, he is drawn to mercurial Sarah Hemmings, also orphaned in childhood. Ishiguro again conjures time and place with precise detail, evoking both the exotic atmosphere of prewar Shanghai, festering with the contrast between the arrogant residents of the International Settlement and the Chinese living in squalid slums and supplied with opium by foreign merchants, and class-conscious England, in which one's "connections" depend on family lineage. While the novel is mainly an introspective account of the protagonist's emotional dislocation, Ishiguro shows a new mastery of narrative tension, notably with Christopher's Kafkaesque experience during the Japanese invasion. In the end, Christopher understands that his vision of reality was distorted, and that his lifelong mission, "chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents," was the inescapable fate of one caught in the toils of historical turbulence. 75,000 first printing.

      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        September 4, 2000
        Set in Shanghai on the eve of World War II, Ishiguro's Booker-nominated novel follows the surreal predicament of Christopher Banks, an English expatriate whose overwrought state is perfectly rendered by narrator John Lee. After his parents are mysteriously kidnapped, nine-year-old Christopher is shipped off to England, where he grows up to become the Sherlock Holmes of his times--a man able to right wrongs, restore order. After 18 years, Banks returns to Shanghai with the bizarre notion that if he can find his parents, he can prevent the world war. Banks's search drags him through the era's Chinese-Japanese war in a masterful sequence where past and present, reality and imagination, good and evil become indistinguishable. Lee seamlessly renders Banks's complex psychology, but he employs an exaggerated nasal voice for the characters of several pompous Brits, and his Chinese and Japanese accents are often off-putting. But listeners probably won't let these small blemishes keep them from Ishiguro's much-acclaimed tale of abandonment, nostalgia and self-delusion. Based on the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, July 10).

popularity
909
links
    • self:
        • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/61da6e05-6aa8-4651-8bb7-8ff82dad6e08/metadata
        • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json
id
61da6e05-6aa8-4651-8bb7-8ff82dad6e08
starRating
3.5
images
    • cover:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0293-1/{61DA6E05-6AA8-4651-8BB7-8FF82DAD6E08}Img100.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • thumbnail:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0293-1/{61DA6E05-6AA8-4651-8BB7-8FF82DAD6E08}Img200.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • cover150Wide:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0293-1/61D/A6E/05/{61DA6E05-6AA8-4651-8BB7-8FF82DAD6E08}Img150.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • cover300Wide:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0293-1/61D/A6E/05/{61DA6E05-6AA8-4651-8BB7-8FF82DAD6E08}Img400.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
isPublicPerformanceAllowed
False
languages
      • code: en
      • name: English
subjects
      • value: Fiction
      • value: Literature
      • value: Suspense
      • value: Thriller
publishDateText
06/21/2005
otherFormatIdentifiers
      • type: ISBN
      • value: 9780060824891
mediaType
Audiobook
shortDescription

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

sortTitle
When We Were Orphans
crossRefId
2396927
awards
      • source: Nobel Foundation
      • value: Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded Author
publisher
HarperAudio
bisacCodes
      • code: FIC019000
      • description: Fiction / Literary
      • code: FIC030000
      • description: Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense