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Title: The Incarnations

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Susan Barker

Narrator: Timo Chen, Joy Osmanski

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-18-15

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 151 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Hailed as "China's Midnight's Children" (The Independent), this "brilliant, mind-expanding, and wildly original novel" (Chris Cleave) is about a Beijing taxi driver whose past incarnations over 1,000 years haunt him through searing letters sent by his mysterious soul mate.

Who are you? You must be wondering. I am your soul mate, your old friend, and I have come back to this city of 16 million in search of you.

So begins the first letter that falls into Wang's lap as he flips down the visor in his taxi. The letters that follow are filled with the stories of Wang's previous lives - from escaping a marriage to a spirit bride to being a slave on the run from Genghis Khan to living as a fisherman during the Opium Wars and being a teenager on the Red Guard during the cultural revolution - bound to his mysterious "soul mate," spanning 1,000 years of betrayal and intrigue.

As the letters continue to appear seemingly out of thin air, Wang becomes convinced that someone is watching him - someone who claims to have known him for over 1,000 years. And with each letter, Wang feels the watcher growing closer and closer....

Seamlessly weaving Chinese folklore, history, and literary classics, The Incarnations is a taut and gripping novel that sheds light on the cyclical nature of history as it hints that the past is never truly settled.

Members Reviews:

What was that you said?

This was one of those audiobooks that I might have enjoyed more if I had not been so annoyed by the narration. The parts read by the woman narrator were fine, but the man's quasi-robotic delivery and bizarre mispronunciation of simple, common words kept throwing me out of the story. He would also stress the wrong word in some sentences, leading to the occasionally hilarious unintended meaning.

Great, complex story, marred by horrible narration

So I'll be making sure to separate my thoughts of the actual book from the narration that it received via audio book. The book was narrated by two people. One was good, the other was horrible. The male narrator dictated everything, even emotions. Dialogue sounded comically robotic. "What. Do. You. Mean?" No emotion, inflection or tone to any of the characters that he portrayed. They all sounded like they were read from a script. Well..they technically were read from a script, but that shouldn't sound like it!

Anyway, despite this one narrators hack job, this book really satiated my love of loopy, cyclical plots. The ending really ties that knot together. In fact throughout the beginning of the novel, things seem very disjointed, unrelated, and happenstance. I was a bit worried that it wouldn't "close the loop" properly as I was expecting even. Even the tales of the incarnations bothered me a bit, which I'll explain later.

The book opens from the perspective of a Taxi driver, Wong, who seems to be a middle aged, down on his life, married Chinese fellow. His life isn't horrible, but underneath the surface, he just seems unhappy. We are given details of Wong's past, piecemeal. His own backstory come into sharper focus as the story progresses, and is masterfully interwoven with letters that he receives. So we get an effect that is allowing us to dig deeper into Wong's complicated past and those around him.