A Stranger in Olondria

Being the Complete Memoirs of the Mystic, Jevick of Tyom

By: Sofia Samatar

Narrated by: Josh Hurley

When reading and writing are the most important things in the world. Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home - but which his mother calls the Ghost Country. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. Just as he revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl. In desperation, Jevick seeks the aid of Olondrian priests and quickly becomes a pawn in the struggle between the empire's two most powerful cults. Even as the country simmers on the cusp of war, he must face his ghost and learn her story before he has any chance of freeing himself by setting her free: an ordeal that challenges his understanding of art and life, home and exile, and the limits of that most seductive of necromancies, reading.

A Stranger in Olondria is a rich, immersive fantasy that circles around and away from and back to the transportation of reading and how ideas can be carried far from their origins in something so simple as a book.

• Winner, 2014 World Fantasy Award, Best Novel

©2013 Sofia Samatar (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

samatar is great

the story is much better than the narrator. i’m sorry to say the narrator rather ruins it. he just was not able to connect with the material. i beg an update.

Worth a Listen

The story wasn't what I expected from the review that lead me to acquire the book. However, I enjoyed it for the most part. There were times I thought the story meandered too much and I lost interest, but other times I was very interested. The narrator was fine I guess. I just finished a book before this with the fantastic narrator Michael Kramer, so I'm a little biased. Sometimes I thought the language was too flowery and contrived, but it is after all a book about the love of reading. In all, I would say it's worth a listen.

Haunting and Colorful

Really enjoyed the complexity of how the story unfolded. The relationships and dynamics in each of the cultures and political spectrums among the variant countries takes the reader on a wonderfully winding journey with multiple perspectives. For the audiobook specifically, the narrator does a fantastic job painting a picture of eclectic characters with their own emotive styles and expressions.

boring

the main character has almost 0 agency and almost never makes their own desicion. the book is 50% describing a place or thing, 40% random grim-style fairy tales, and 10% a plot.