The Extinction of Irena Rey

By: Jennifer Croft

Narrated by: Lanessa Tremblett

Bloomsbury presents The Extinction of Irena Ray by Jennifer Croft, read by Lanessa Tremblett.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, TOWN & COUNTRY, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, CRIMEREADS, DOCUMENT JOURNAL, AND WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS * NAMED A MUST READ BY NPR, PEOPLE, VANITY FAIR, NYLON, ALTA JOURNAL, AND DEBUTIFUL

International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women’s Prize finalist Jennifer Croft’s madly brilliant mystery novel of transformation and translation in Europe’s last great wilderness.

“Savvy, sly, and hard to classify. A bacchanal.” —New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Fiercely inventive.” —Washington Post
“Knives Out on mushrooms.” —Elle
“Could only be written by master of language, a tamer of different tongues. It is brilliant, fun, and absolutely alive.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Eight translators gather in the primeval forest home of the world-renowned Irena Rey. They are there to translate her magnum opus together, but within days of their arrival, Irena disappears.

The translators embark on a frantic search, delving into ancient woods filled with strange flora, fauna, and fungi and examining her enigmatic texts and belongings for clues. But doing so reveals secrets they are utterly unprepared for, and they quickly find themselves tangled up in a web of rivalries and desires that threaten not only their work, but the fate of their beloved author herself.©2024 Jennifer Croft (P)2024 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

good story, unfortunate reading performance

I didn’t like the reader’s interpretation of dialogue. Her “voices” for the characters were annoying.

A book about obsession

What happens when 9 translators get obsessed with the writer they are translating for? Beautifully written but hard to stay focused on content. Made myself finish the book

beautiful language, good questions, unlikeable characters and frustrating ending.

A pet peeve: I thought I was going to lose it every time the narrator pronounced it "Chaise LONG"

I found myself wanting to read Grey Eminence more than The Extinction, wanting to see and live in Białowieża forest more than watch these 9 translators shuffle through their indecision.

Is it a mystery? Yes. But it's unresolved, and not in the way that reveals something new instead. I found the resolution left too many questions about logistics and intent. Why did Irena do what she did? I still don't know. And neither do the translators.

This book gave me a lot of miscellany to think about: the role of translators, of conservation, the invasion of land and mind. But I'm not sure the story landed as well as was planned. Ultimately I was exhausted listening to the petty squabbles of the two main translators, and the jealousy of Spanish around Swedish. I'm unsure why that relationship was even relevant. So many symbols left unexplored in this book. So many people I still don't know.

Overrated

Terrible reader of a shallow story. There are 1 million books better than this, so move on and pick a different one.

Annoying vocal fry hurts the book.

The book is great but marred by the narrator’s annoying vocal fry at the end of nearly all of her sentences. Hurts the ears after a while and scratches the mind. It sounds like the narrator just woke up from a long snooze. She could have been directed not to that as she has a pleasant tone and not a bad delivery otherwise. This book deserves to be re-recorded with more meticulous direction.