Earthlings

A Novel

De: Sayaka Murata

Narrado por: Nancy Wu

• Amazon Editor’s Top Pick
• Bustle Pick
• Vulture.com Pick

As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. Each summer, Natsuki counts down the days until her family drives into the mountains of Nagano to visit her grandparents in their wooden house in the forest, a place that couldn’t be more different from her grey commuter town. One summer, her cousin Yuu confides to Natsuki that he is an extraterrestrial and that every night he searches the sky for the spaceship that might take him back to his home planet. Natsuki wonders if she might be an alien too.

Back in her city home, Natsuki is scolded or ignored and even preyed upon by a young teacher at her cram school. As she grows up in a hostile, violent world, she consoles herself with memories of her time with Yuu and discovers a surprisingly potent inner power. Natsuki seems forced to fit into a society she deems a “baby factory,” but even as a married woman she wonders if there is more to this world than the mundane reality everyone else seems to accept. The answers are out there, and Natsuki has the power to find them.

Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world and cements Sayaka Murata’s status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe.

©2018 Sakaya Murata (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

So messed up

If you like ultraviolence, screwed up humor, and devastating childhood tales, this is for you. Otherwise, it's nauseating and it just gets worse and worse. I would classify it as bizarro lit more than anything else. If you like bizarro, go for it.

Excellent and gripping

Another masterpiece by Sakaya, beautifully read and written by Lucy Yu. Very dark and intense, loved every minute. Highly recommended. Run and grab the book, you won’t be sorry.

Things got weird Quick

This story had a few very powerful messages that would have benefited the story line. I understand what the author was trying to do towards the end, but it took away from the overall story.

if they would have applied those powerful messages to the main characters to where they were able to learn and heal from the trauma would have been a better story line (that could have also incorporated murder)

just an amazingly weird tale

awkward at alot of times. but there is plenty of justification depth to characters. really interesting, but very challenging.

A great (but upsetting) listen!

Quite upsetting at times, but still a great listen! The ”hard to listen to” parts of the story serves a purpose, it’s not there for chock value or something like that.