The Men

By: Sandra Newman

Narrated by: Mia Barron

From the author of The Heavens, a dazzling, mind-bending novel in which all men mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth.

Deep in the California woods on an evening in late August, Jane Pearson is camping with her husband, Leo, and their five-year-old son, Benjamin. As dusk sets in, she drifts softly to sleep in a hammock strung outside the tent where Leo and Benjamin are preparing for bed. At that moment, every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes around the world, disappearing from operating theaters mid-surgery, from behind the wheels of cars, from arguments and acts of love. Children, adults, even fetuses are gone in an instant. Leo and Benjamin are gone. No one knows why, how, or where.

After the Disappearance, Jane forces herself to enter a world she barely recognizes, one where women must create new ways of living while coping with devastating grief. As people come together to rebuild depopulated industries and distribute scarce resources, Jane focuses on reuniting with an old college girlfriend, Evangelyne Moreau, leader of the Commensalist Party of America, a rising political force in this new world. Meanwhile, strange video footage called “The Men” is being broadcast online showing images of the vanished men marching through barren, otherworldly landscapes. Is this just a hoax, or could it hold the key to the Disappearance?

From the author of The Heavens, The Men is a gripping, beautiful, and disquieting novel of feminist utopias and impossible sacrifices that interrogates the dream of a perfect society and the conflict between individual desire and the good of the community.

©2022 Sandra Newman (P)2022 Recorded Books

Not what I expected and that's okay

Nick Gillespie recommended this author on The Reason Roundtable (10/30/2023). After reviewing her tires, I chose this one to start with The Men, thinking it would be a sci-fi social commentary. Kind of yeah and kind of no. But definitely interesting and thought provoking.

I'm sadly unsurprised by the reviews here that are negative because the author failed to write the book the reader thought they should have written. Those reviews exemplify the issues the author tackles in the novel.

Hard to Follow

The story was splintered with side stories and plot lines. I wanted to like this book but just couldn’t.

Not for everyone- but this has become my favorite book of the year

Holy crap. This book had so many weird twists and nuances that it was hard to pace myself. Fascinating take, weird twists at every turn, and some powerful conversations. If you liked the Showtime hit series Yellowjackets, this could be your new favorite book too.

Not sure what I read

A very unusual distorted story that I simply wasn't able to discern its purpose.. The narration and vocabulary however were excellent. Go figure.

Then she woke up

Read "The White Plague" by Frank Herbert for a more honest exploration of this class of "high concept" sexual themes. It would have been more engaging if the actual consequences of all white chromosome bearing humans disappearing had been explored. The excuse provided at the end to avoid realism in this respect strikes me as a cop-out. Throwing in racial conflict in such a stereotypical way panders to the target audience perhaps and maybe it was a result of good marketing but I feel cheated.

Spoh-KANN, not Spoh-KAIN

Hate it so much when no director. editor, producer, etc. catches really blatant mispronunciations throughout eight hours of voice work. Terrible production value.

The reader is only marginal, but even if she had been better, I’d still recommend reading this one yourself. The writing just doesn’t really execute well as a read-aloud.

Good premises, but not so good delivery

I bought this book after reading an opinion piece by Pamela Paul in the NYT: "She Wrote a Dystopian Novel. What Happened Next Was Pretty Dystopian." in which she describes how the author was vilified months before the book was even published. She ended her article with "Most people don’t want to live in a world in which books are vilified without being read and their authors attacked ad hominem for the temerity of having written them. There’s an answer to attacks like these: Read the book."
So I did.
This is not a book that should elicit vehement charges of gender essentialism and transphobia. I agree with another reviewer that good editing is totally missing and could have done wonders. Still, I was entertained for 8 hours.

Great story, but would rather read

The Audible version has quite a few errors, repeated sentences several times and mis-pronunciations. I loved the story but it was not produced well for Audio.

Not What I Expected but Glad I Listened

I came to this expecting sci-fi and this isn’t that genre at all, however it was a well crafted meditation on gender, race and privilege through a female lens. A fast listen that I found thought provoking.

Abrupt unsatisfying ending

This book is captivating. The characters are AMAZING. The story original. Then it just ends. It’s NOT the ending the book deserves. It is a pity.