Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Goodbye, Vitamin

By: Rachel Khong
Narrated by: Therese Plummer
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £7.99

Buy Now for £7.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

'A beautifully written coming-of-age debut, dreamy and funny ... flawless' Independent

'Khong is a magician... Brilliant' Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

‘Khong’s first novel sneaks up on you – just like life, illness and heartbreak. And love. A million small, human and often deeply funny details gather force to tell a tale that is ultimately, incredibly poignant’ Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man

Ruth is thirty and her life is falling apart: she and her fiancé are moving house, but he's moving out to live with another woman; her career is going nowhere; and then she learns that her father, a history professor beloved by his students, has Alzheimer’s. At Christmas, her mother begs her to stay on and help. For a year. Goodbye, Vitamin is the wry, beautifully observed story of a woman at a crossroads, as Ruth and her friends attempt to shore up her father’s career; she and her mother obsess over the ambiguous health benefits – in the absence of a cure – of dried jellyfish supplements and vitamin pills; and they all try to forge a new relationship with the brilliant, childlike, irascible man her father has become.

?'Biting, funny and poignant and makes you wish you’d thought of writing it first' Stylist, '50 Unmissable Books'

'A deceptively complex tale of dementia and its impact on a family … Like a chain of fairy lights in the darkness' Financial Times

'One of the funniest elegiac novels I have ever read' David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes
©2017 Rachel Khong (P)2017 Simon & Schuster Audio UK
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

Glitter and Glue cover art
Best Friends Forever cover art
Then Came You cover art
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls cover art
The Mighty Miss Malone cover art
The Things We Do for Love cover art
You've Been so Lucky Already cover art
Just a Regular Boy cover art
I Came to Say Goodbye cover art
It Ends with Us cover art
The House by the River cover art
Bark cover art
My Girls cover art
The Leavers cover art
A Gate at the Stairs cover art
Regretting You cover art

Critic reviews

'Brilliant disquisition on family, relationships and adulthood, told in prose that is so startling in its spare beauty that I found mysef thinking about Khong's turns of phrase for days after I finished reading.' (Doree Shafrir, New York Review of Books)
‘A deceptively complex tale of dementia and its impact on a family… Like a chain of fairy lights in the darkness, with Khong displaying a deep understanding of the way in which memory humanises and connects us individually communally – and without which all becomes chaos’ (Catherine Taylor, Financial Times)
'Mostly this sweet-natured novel is about Ruth’s attempts to come to terms with a past her father can no longer remember while still attending to the quirky, fleeting joys of the present. 'Here I am, in lieu of you,' she writes, 'collecting the moments.' (Sam Sacks, ‘Best New Fiction, Wall Street Journal)

What listeners say about Goodbye, Vitamin

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    2
  • 4 Stars
    4
  • 3 Stars
    3
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    1
Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    3
  • 4 Stars
    5
  • 3 Stars
    2
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    2
  • 4 Stars
    4
  • 3 Stars
    2
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    1

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Sorry didn't enjoy the style with no story really

Just a diary of events but with no really story or ending. My Book Club (x8 persons) all thought similarly; only one enjoyed the diary style.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!