Behind the Mic: On Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon, Read by Ramón de Ocampo

Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens.

In a story that shifts through time, Ramón de Ocampo is a welcome guide, and his narration is as lush and mesmerizing as the prose itself. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile’s Emily Connelly talk about Paul Yoon’s historical novel that begins in Laos in 1969, and shows three very different paths taken by teenagers caught up in the bombing of the country by the United States. Alisak, Pranny, and Noi have found work in an almost completely abandoned field hospital, getting paid to ride motorbikes through streets and fields of unexploded bombs to ferry in supplies and the injured. The friends are separated when a doctor helps them escape, and we discover how tiny actions can have huge ramifications.

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