Speaker for the Dead

This audio book amazed me. It follows on from Enders Game but is a vast departure from that story in both style and content. Listening to this book is like meditation - it's so deep and moving, and yet never boring. Pure Bliss! Wonderful narration. The first ever audio book to make me cry.

So good that I wish I had never heard it, so that I could discover it for the first time again.

One of Audible's gems.

This was a good book very different to the first book in the seris but it takes the main character Ender in a new direction.

I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading the next book.

I love this whole series. The second book is as always wonderfully narrated. This book is quite different from the first, and that is a good thing. The author isn't being lazy and looking at the same questions over and over again. This, as it happens, is true for most of his books.

The book has its good and bad side. I like the detailed characters, altough the whole story is interwoven with religious stuff, sin, christianity, self-pity ... Can you image planets being colonized thousands of years from now with bishops as a main function in society ? I sure can't and I sure not hope so, just too far fetched...

I looked him up on wiki after hearing the book that's when I found out his story are interwoven with his mormone religion...

The book won a hugo award, main reason I wanted to hear it. But my guess is is that America gave this man an award because christianity is 30% of the SF story...

3 stars for the characters & plot, -2 for religous crap ...

All in all worth hearing though

This story takes ender and follows him into his adult life , it shows how the battle school and descisions he made while there affected his adult life , showing for me that osc has a real understanding and empathy for his character and not just writing another story because the first book did well.
This really comes across with the relationship ender has with his sister with jane and the familly he befriends, also with the comunity he affects just by being there.
As this is the second book in the series you may feel that you need to read the first and you should because it is an excellent book but the refferences in this book explain themselves so you can read it as a book and not feel left out.

Excellent book, fantastic narration.

I really liked this book. It follows on from Ender's Game and brings the listener on to the next stage of the principal character's life/development. I wasn't much into science fiction. Then I read Ender's Game and next Speaker for the Dead. I must say I am now a convert. Both these books were great. Great stories, well developed characters, appropriatley paced. I read other reviews after reading these books and now I feel I may have started at the pinnacle and may have let myself in for a lot of disappointment going forward. I would strongly suggest that one reads Ender's Game before Speaker for the Dead. They both stand well alone but it certainly will add to your enjoyment should you read in sequence.
All in all I would highly recommend this book. Having not read a lot of science fiction this book and it's prequel will make me seek out more from this genre. I would highly recommend this book and the audiobook experience enhanced it even more. The production values of the audio are also very good. The timely usage of background music adds an other world atmosphere and the reader's voice is easy to listen to while retaining one's attention.

Story-telling at its best. I thoroughly enjoyed Ender's Game and this is a brilliant but very different sequel. Do not expect a continuation of the same themes as EG; Ender has matured both as the written character and as the man, and he is now seeking redemption for his xenocide. Beautiful storytelling by OSC and the excellent narrators - If you enjoy Sci-Fi or are hooked by the original Ender book, you will not be dissapointed.

I really don't like flatly contradicting other reviewers, and someone else has said this is their favourite book ever. However, personally I disliked it and, after several hours of hoping it would improve, eventually moved onto something else without finishing it. Part of the problem was that, although I had read and enjoyed Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, there were clearly some books that I'd missed out of the series which meant that there were some big leaps in understanding this (I've noticed this elsewhere on Audible with series: absolutely no attempt is made to help the reader work out which order to listen in, and sometimes the reviews are actively quite misleading).
However, I also found the plot painfully slow and the female half of the narrating team had me grinding my teeth at the way she was determined to wring every ounce of slow pathos out of the story.
So this might be the best book ever or it might be one you'll never finish. Personally, I would recommend making sure that you're listening to the series in the right order and also listening to the start of the narration to see if it seems like your cup of tea.