The Best Audiobooks of 2024 (so far)

How has 2024 been as a year for audiobooks? Are there any trends that you’ve observed that you haven’t seen before?

It’s not a new trend, but something that I’m seeing more and more is the multi-voiced performance. In multi-voice, there is no real interaction between the characters, but each chapter from a different perspective is read by a different narrator. And I’m seeing more full cast recordings—with sound effects, music.

Also, maybe it’s just because they always give me the celebrity biographies, but I feel a lot more celebrities are writing an autobiography and narrating it themselves—and giving us that peek behind the curtain into their lives.

Let’s go through the audiobooks you’ve chosen as your favourites of 2024 so far. First up is Gender Queer, a memoir by Maia Kobabe from a few years ago that has just been turned into an audiobook. Tell me more.

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe is a graphic novel that was adapted into a full cast performance. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to chat with the author and illustrator Maia Kobabe, who also narrated, and Nick Martorelli from Penguin Random House, who worked together with Maia on adapting it.

It’s a fun story in many ways, because Maia is revisiting coming to terms with being non-binary a decade later. So having more time and more experience layered on top of that acceptance of self and this coming out of self is interesting. It allowed them to make some changes in the original text: not just to convert it to the audio format, but also to recognize a little bit of where they are today versus where they were when it was originally written.

Listening to the book, it feels like you’re at the movies in terms of the sound effects.

Yes, because they’ve got to take the amazing illustrations and put them into the audio soundscape, so that you understand what is happening. They’ve done that with music, with sound effects, with silence at times, and a full cast. Maia gets to play Maia, and Maia’s sibling is also in the piece. They have also come out as they. Then there are audiobook narrators playing parents and other characters, including Trini Alvarado, someone who Maia—who is an audiobook listener—had listened to and was excited about.

Let’s go on to Bits and Pieces, which is another memoir, in this case by Whoopi Goldberg. Tell me more.

Whoopi Goldberg many of us know as a comedian and an actor—movies like Ghost and Color Purple. She is now also a talk show host. But I didn’t really think about her life and background too much. What was lovely about Bits and Pieces is that she’s talking about her mother and her brother, who she was close to, and who have both passed away. So, she’s talking about her grief, but it was such a hopeful, wonderful experience to listen to. She had such love and respect and holds them in a lovely place.

She talks about her childhood, which wasn’t free of challenges. Her mother’s life was really difficult. She didn’t know that her mother was sent away for a mental illness for a while. When she returned, she had memory loss, she couldn’t really understand her relationship with her kids, but she faked it till she made it on some level.

What I really enjoyed about this listening experience was that Whoopi sounded so natural. You can hear her laugh, you can hear her have these reactions—and she just sounds like she’s telling you a story and discovering the words as she goes along, which is unusual. It didn’t feel as if it was written, if that makes sense.

And is it quite funny, given she’s a comedian?

It’s got some funny parts and it’s got some emotionally intense parts, but I took away from it more joy than anything else.

OK so your next two choices are both mystery and suspense audiobooks, which I love listening to. First up is Anna O by Matthew Blake, which is supposed to be an “extraordinary twisty novel.”

It is twisty. Dan Stevens—of Downton Abbey fame—narrates the main character, a doctor who is trying to bring some new techniques to wake up a “sleeping beauty” who may have committed a crime. He’s experimenting with all these things to wake up the woman who has had an emotionally overwhelming experience. They want to wake her up so that she can be prosecuted. You really have to pay attention to what is happening, because…I don’t want to say too much, but it’s so twisty and turny.

When I finished it, I almost wanted to go back and start again and see if I could figure it out. Where were all the Easter eggs that gave me the clues? I was going, ‘What? Oh, wait! What?’ throughout. So, if you like a good psychological thriller that isn’t necessarily going to go where you thought it would, this is a great option. And it’s got all the different narrators playing the different parts. They’re not really interacting, but you’re getting their different perspectives in an excellent way.

So that’s quite a dark one, then—not one to go for if you want some cheery escapism.

No, not cheery escapism, but psychological twists and turns, yes. It’s definitely dark—I like dark things.

Let’s go on to First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston. Tell me more.

I am clearly into twisty mysteries that don’t really tell me where they’re going. This one is all about running cons. The main character is a con artist, who is in small-time cons. She gets involved with a group that runs much bigger, longer-term cons, and ultimately gets involved with a man through one of these cons. You really must pay attention. Is she going to be in trouble with the main person who is running this con group? That’s a big issue.

I love strategy and strategy games. This one was completely for me because I was constantly thinking, ‘Who’s playing who?’

And this one has just a single narrator, I think?

Yes, Saskia Maarleveld, who is fantastic. She gets to play these dark characters who are trying to one up each other. She plays the role of the main character, but also the role of the main character who is playing someone else in a con. So, there are a lot of layers to this. She was just great.

Lastly, you’ve chosen a novel: Above the Fire by Michael O’Donnell.

This one is about Doug, a widower from the Boston area, and his seven-year-old son. They are trying to deal with their grief—the loss of a wife and mother—by going on a sojourn to New Hampshire, and suddenly the world kind of ends. No one really knows what has happened, and they can’t communicate with the outside world. There seem to be fires that are happening down below, and they are unsure of what to do. Has there been a political disaster? Have nuclear bombs dropped? What is going on?

They go further into the wilderness, essentially to keep away from whatever is happening where there are more humans. They must survive through this year—the man and his son together.

Now I should say that their survival is not like The Road by Cormac McCarthy. They have food, they have shelter. It’s more, ‘If it’s just you and your seven-year-old kid, what are you teaching them, if you don’t know what’s gone on? How, when someone new comes along, are you interacting with that person?’

Again, it is very psychological and emotional. That is what I liked about it. It is a quiet, post-apocalyptic novel, although we do not even know if it’s post-apocalyptic because we don’t know what’s happened.

What about the narration?

Robert Fass is fantastic playing the father and son. You do not want to overplay being a seven-year-old. It is very subtle what he does. You just go along the emotional journey with him. For me, hearing his voice and hearing what the father was feeling, Robert just did that perfectly. He captured those intense emotions in a quiet way that didn’t outstrip what the words were doing, but really sucked me in.

So, again, a dark one rather than a feel-good novel?

Dark, but not horribly dark. He and his son have been put up with this big challenge, but they are also trying to work through their grief. They are able to get past that grief, in a way. He gains as a character throughout the challenge here as well.