"Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. His small act of kindness propels him into a world he never dreamed existed. There are people who fall through the cracks, and Richard has become one of them. And he must learn to survive in this city of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, murderers and angels, if he is ever to return to the London that he knew."

Acquired via PaperBackSwap.com (Unabridged on 10 CD's; read by the author)

I'm now convinced that something must be wrong with me, because as much as I want to like Neil Gaiman based on how everyone else seems to love his writing, I just can't. He does a great job narrating his own audiobooks, and his writing itself is decent enough. It's quite good, in fact. But I guess it's the subject matter or the genre that I can't make myself love. This is the third work of Gaiman's that I've read, and I've felt more or less the same about each one. The writing is good, but I just don't find myself all that interested in the storylines. My mind wanders, and I find myself waiting for the book to end so that I can move on to my next read.

In this particular novel, Richard Mayhew is an average sort of guy living in London. He's got a decent job, a good-looking but demanding fiancée, and an all-around average kind of life. But when he one day stops to help a young girl on the sidewalk who's been injured, his life turns completely upside down. Or rather, the life as he knows it becomes non-existent, he "falls through the cracks," and finds himself in the Underworld of London. There, he meets all sorts of eccentric characters, battles good and evil, and discovers hidden strengths he didn't know that he had. As with Gaiman's other stories, it's a hard novel to classify and doesn't particularly fit into a single genre, although fantasy/sci-fi would probably cover most of it.

I'm still convinced that there must be a story of Gaiman's out there that will appeal to me, and so I'm not quite ready to give up on him yet, especially since I have a few more of his books sitting on my bookshelves waiting to be read. But I think I need to fit in a few other authors before I try him again.

Off to erishkigal, via audio VBB. Enjoy! :)

Yay~it's in Salt Lake :D Thanks!

Oh dear, I listened to this a while back, and it’s simply been sitting on my shelf since then. And it’s much too good not to be enjoyed by others. Neverwhere is the first book I read of Neil Gaiman’s. - I loved it, and so couldn’t resist choosing this audio version. To find it read by Gaiman himself, was icing on the cake 😊

I’m happy to be doing another round of Big John Lefty’s audio Vbb (it’s been a while since I’ve participated), and so I am offering this book as one of my seeds.

ps
I definitely consider this a fantasy.