Occupied City
About this audiobook
On January 26, 1948, a public health official arrives at a branch of the Teikoku Bank in Tokyo. There has been an outbreak of dysentery in the neighborhood, he tells the manager, and he has been assigned by Occupation authorities to treat all locals who might have been exposed.
The sixteen members of the staff gather as the official pours the first of two separate medicines into sixteen cups and instructs them in how exactly to drink it. Within five minutes, ten employees are dead and the official has fled. But the horrific crime is merely the catalyst for this blistering novel.
In twelve different voices—each telling the story of the murder from a singular perspective—the narrative gathers staggering power and pathos. We hear one of the victims speak from the grave. We read the increasingly mad notes of one of the case detectives, the desperate letters of an American occupier, and the testimony of a traumatized survivor. We meet a journalist, a gangster-turned-businessman, a man who calls himself “The Occult Detective,” a Soviet soldier, and a well-known painter accused and convicted of the crime. Every voice enlarges and deepens the portrait of a people making their way out of a war-induced hell. Wittingly or unwittingly, each one of them plays a part in blurring the line between truth and lies: in their own lives, in the life of their city, their history, their nation, the newly emerging postwar world.
A stunningly audacious work of fiction, Occupied City envelops the reader in its extreme time and place with its brilliantly idiosyncratic, expressionistic, and mesmerizing narrative.
About the author
DAVID PEACE is the author of Occupied City, Tokyo Year Zero, The Red Riding Quartet, GB84, and The Damned Utd. He was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists of 2003, and has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the German Crime Fiction Award, and France's Grand Prix du Roman Noir for Best Foreign Novel. In 2007, he was named as GQ (UK) Writer of the Year. He lived in Tokyo for 15 years before returning to his native Yorkshire where he now lives.
Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales on 27 October 1914. In 1934 his first book of poetry, Eighteen Poems appeared, followed by Twenty-five Poems in 1936, Deaths and Entrances in 1946 and in 1952 his final volume, Collected Poems. He also published many short stories, wrote filmscripts, broadcast stories and talks, did a series of lecture tours in the United States and wrote Under Milkwood, the radio play.During his fourth lecture tour of the United States in 1953, a few days after his 39th birthday, he collapsed in his New York hotel and died on November 9th at St. Vincent's Hospital. His body was sent back to Laugharne, Wales, where his grave is marked by a simple wooden cross.In June 1994, his wife, Caitlin Thomas, died in Italy, where she had spent most of the years of her life after the death of Dylan Thomas. Her body is buried next to his.
Justine Eyre is an award-winning audiobook narrator who has recorded over three-hundred titles. Named a 2013 AudioFile Best Voice, she has won an Audie Award and multiple Earphones Awards. Classically trained and multilingual, she performs on stage, television, and film and has had roles in King Lear and The Crucible, on Two and a Half Men and Mad Men, and in multiple indie-circuit films.
Bronson Pinchot is an Earphones and Audie Award–winning narrator and Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010.
Lorna Raver, named one of AudioFile magazine’s Best Voices of the Year, has received numerous Audie nominations and AudioFile Earphones Awards. An experienced stage actress, she has also guest-starred on many top television series and starred in the film Drag Me to Hell.
Alton Takiyama-Chung is a professional storyteller with a passion for Asian folktales and Hawaiian legends. In 2005, he was awarded the first JJ Reneaux Emerging Artist Award by the National Storytelling Network. He currently resides in Vancouver, Washington, and is the technical director of a small theater company in Portland, Oregon.
Stefan Rudnicki is an award winning audiobook narrator, director and producer. He was born in Poland and now resides in Studio City, California. He has narrated more than three hundred audiobooks and has participated in over a thousand as a writer, producer, or director. He is a recipient of multiple Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as a Grammy Award, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Ray Bradbury Award. He received AudioFile’s award for 2008 Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Along with a cast of other narrators, Rudnicki has read a number of Orson Scott Card's best-selling science fiction novels. He worked extensively with many other science fiction authors, including David Weber and Ben Bova. In reviewing the twentieth anniversary edition audiobook of Card’s Ender's Game, Publishers Weekly stated, "Rudnicki, with his lulling, sonorous voice, does a fine job articulating Ender's inner struggle between the kind, peaceful boy he wants to be and the savage, violent actions he is frequently forced to take." Rudnicki is also a stage actor and director.
