City of Orange

By: David Yoon

Narrated by: Intae Kim

Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

A man wakes up in an unknown landscape, injured and alone.

He used to live in a place called California, but how did he wind up here with a head wound and a bottle of pills in his pocket?

He navigates his surroundings, one rough shape at a time. Here lies a pipe, there a reed that could be carved into a weapon, beyond a city he once lived in.

He could swear his daughter’s name began with a J, but what was it, exactly?

Then he encounters an old man, a crow, and a boy—and realizes that nothing is what he thought it was, neither the present nor the past.

He can’t even recall the features of his own face, and wonders: who am I?

Harrowing and haunting but also humorous in the face of the unfathomable, David Yoon’s City of Orange is a novel about reassembling the things that make us who we are, and finding the way home again.

©2022 David Yoon (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Occasionally tragic, persistently funny, City of Orange is a brilliantly constructed meditation on love, memory, and the end of the world."
—John Cho, Actor, Author of Troublemaker

"Very few postapocalyptic novels have the literary qualities of this one. City of Orange belongs in a very narrow category, alongside Emily St. John’s Station Eleven, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Like all the best authors in the genre, David Yoon is willing to ask what ‘the End of the World’ really means — and provide the reader with a thoughtful, heartfelt answer."
—SF Chronicle

"Yoon finds the tension in the smallest of acts—like heating up a can of soup—and builds suspense by teasing out information about the world, forcing readers to question everything. Fans of The Martian will enjoy this new take on the struggle to survive in an unfamiliar land."
—Publishers Weekly

A perfectly wonderful book

I’m so glad I listened to this book. Its depth and and insight into the human condition was soul-filling. Don’t miss it.

Long and pointless

Some reviewers compared this audiobook with The Martian. It is NOTHING like The Martian. The Martian was an interesting story, complex, well-told. This book is none of these things. The story is slow, boring, repetitive and pointless. I endured through the end hoping something interesting would happen. It did not. I only survived by increasing the playback speed to 1.5x, but even then it was difficult to endure.

A Person Lead a Boring Depressing Life

I came into this story with high hopes given the reviews comparing it to Project Hail Mary. While the setup is similar, guy with amnesia going on a journey to a strange new world haunted by flashbacks, PHM featured a protagonist with an interesting back story and a sense of humor exploring a strange and exciting world with real stakes.

This is 11 hours of someone naval gazing his way through a dull landscape with features as boring as he is. The flashbacks reveal an equally dull life so unimaginative I had fast forward at times just to get away from it.

I kept hoping for something exciting at the end, some big reveal that would make the endless monotony worth it, sadly the big twist proved to be just as dull and unimaginative as the rest of the story. I will at least say the narration was excellent.