From vertiginous, ensemble-cast excursions through the dark web and French Polynesia to searing inner monologues of the antebellum South, the Brooklyn rave scene and American music royalty: The year’s best audiobooks are exceptional not just for their writing, but for the vocal performances that make these narratives particularly absorbing in your ear.
James
By Percival Everett; read by Dominic Hoffman
Several times throughout this retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the titular enslaved man (Twain’s Jim), a white character notices James’s standard English cadence with shock and asks: “Why are you talking like that?” With impressive comedic timing and vocal agility, Hoffman skips nimbly between James’s natural eloquence and the “slave filter” he uses to hide it from white people, deepening a project that hinges on vernacular as both signifier and tool of liberation.
All Fours
By Miranda July; read by the author
A 45-year-old “workaholic” with a husband, child and an unspecified “creative” career embarks on a solo cross-country road trip but never makes it more than half an hour from home, thanks to a sexy young Hertz employee who washes her car windows and is apparently worth sacrificing not just a vacation but an entire life. July, a multi-hyphenate fiction writer, filmmaker, actor and artist whose “minor celebrity” seems comparable to her protagonist’s, reads her feverish and hedonistic new novel in what feels like one breath, her raspy monotone barreling through a motel-room affair, flashbacks of her child’s near-fatal birth and existential negotiations with her evolving sexuality, motherhood, perimenopause and mortality.
The Wide Wide Sea
By Hampton Sides; read by Peter Noble
This Odyssean account of an 18th-century maritime expedition in search of the Northwest Passage puts Capt. James Cook’s contributions — to the British Empire, to modern cartography, to Western perceptions and misperceptions of Polynesian history and culture — in a 21st-century context. Noble reads the full range of Cook’s anthropological and environmental encounters in the two and a half years he was at sea with the same pathos and subtlety he gives to Sides’s deep considerations of Cook’s command, curiosity and intellect — and of the shifts in temper that would arguably cost him his life.
Rejection
By Tony Tulathimutte; read by Micky Shiloah, Allyson Ryan, Quincy Surasmith, Dan Bittner, André Santana, Marcha Kia, Eunice Wong and Madeleine Maby
An ensemble cast reads this outrageous collection of linked stories with characters in varying degrees of disgusting, degraded, dangerous: an incel with narrow shoulders and a meek voice who boasts, “if not feminist values per se, the value of feminist values”; a gay Asian man whose sexuality remains only “theoretical” until the very end, when he spells out an excruciating, half-hour-long sexual fantasy for a custom-order porn site; a late-20-something publishing admin who licks her romantic wounds by committing casual racism in a tonally flawless group chat. This group of narrators does justice to both Tulathimutte’s impressive control of language and to the individual psyches that make each of his characters wholly distinct.
From Here to the Great Unknown
By Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough; read by Riley Keough and Julia Roberts
When she died in 2023, Presley left behind an unfinished memoir and hours of interviews she recorded for it, shards of a life that have been gathered into a tortured and mesmerizing whole by her daughter. It is the story of a little girl who has everything she wants except, eventually, her father; who is sexually abused and thrown out of school and falls hopelessly in love, again and again and again. Presley’s life is so slippery and complex it feels right to hear it through a prism of multiple viewpoints. Roberts gives a pained and powerful expression to Presley’s writing; Keough fills in the gaps with her own memories, her delicate voice laden with fresh grief; and Presley’s own recordings interrupt with the haunting effect of a ghost.
Long Island
By Colm Tóibín; read by Saoirse Ronan
Ronan, who starred in the 2015 movie adaptation of Tóibín’s 2009 novel, reprises her role as the whip-smart and plucky Irish émigré Eilis Lacey, who in 1951 travels by steamer across the Atlantic, dividing her attention and sympathy between two homes that are no longer quite. In her gentle, stoic delivery, Ronan renders Eilis’s dramas large and small — the Brooklyn boardinghouse where her crippling loneliness morphs slowly into a gossipy sort of community; her accounting aspirations; her Italian American suitor and the wrenching pain of loss — as matters of great sentiment, humor and dignity.
Health and Safety
By Emily Witt; read by the author
Reading her memoir of sex, drugs and late-stage capitalism from a foreboding, almost deadpan remove, Witt’s voice cracks (as far as I can tell) only once, but her vocal restraint itself signals the tenderness of her wounds. This audiobook retraces Witt’s steps through three overlapping plotlines: her relationship with a tall, “unkempt,” unstable computer programmer named Andrew; her immersion in the Brooklyn rave scene; and her growing dismay over the first Trump presidency. After years of sharing a fourth-floor walk-up, so many drug trips (“mostly the classics: LSD, MDMA, mushrooms, ketamine”) and a general disdain for anything that smells of “the totalizing ideological stranglehold of capitalism,” as one rave poster puts it, the couple implode — and their comedown feels as inevitable as the political and epidemiological circumstances that surround it.
Whale Fall
By Elizabeth O’Connor; read by Gwyneth Keyworth and featuring Dyfrig Morris, Gabrielle Glaister, Jot Davies and Nick Griffiths
On a remote island off Wales in the early years of World War II, 18-year-old Manod faces the unappealing prospect of becoming a fisherman’s wife until she is hired by a pair of English ethnographers, Edward and Joan, as their translator and general assistant. Reading Manod’s narration, Keyworth’s voice throughout this short and atmospheric audiobook is both soft and melancholy, slipping easily between English and Welsh as she conveys the dramas of the teenager’s love life, her limited window onto the dishonesty of her employers’ cross-cultural “research” and the gray isolation that surrounds her.
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