Best Audiobooks

In another of our end-of-year series highlighting the best audiobooks of 2024, our friends at AudioFile magazine offer an overview of the best new nonfiction audiobooks—including a sparky history of reality TV by New Yorker staffer Emily Nussbaum and highly acclaimed works of memoir and cultural criticism by Hanif Abdurraqib and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Always looking for the perfect audiobook to listen to in the car, during exercise, or while cleaning—and never know where to start? We've got you. Our friends at AudioFile magazine have put together their definitive guide to the best audiobooks of 2024. Here are the recent fiction releases they recommend most strongly: six novels read by gifted narrators that will keep you captivated.

For an engrossing read, it doesn't get much better than a good audiobook. Michele Cobb, publisher of AudioFile magazine, shares her favourite new audiobooks from the first half of 2024—from engaging memoirs narrated by their authors, to dark psychological thrillers and a post-apocalyptic novel set in New Hampshire.

From Whoopi Goldberg telling you the story of her life to the biography of a civil rights icon, from the lives of three jazz greats and Billie Holiday's last year to what Stanley Tucci ate in a year, AudioFile magazine's best biography and memoir audiobooks of 2024.

If you enjoy listening to books as audiobooks, it's a great time to be alive. From Rosamund Pike narrating Pride and Prejudice, Jeremy Irons reading Lolita to Meryl Streep telling the story of Heartburn, many prominent actors have signed up for performing their favourite books in unabridged versions.

AudioFile magazine is one of the best places on the web for audiobook reviews. At the end of every year, its editors compile lists that highlight the best audiobooks across a range of genres, including fiction, nonfiction, biography and mystery. Laura Sackton, a contributor at AudioFile, talks us through some of her favourites from their best of 2023 lists—and explains how she got the bug for listening to books as well as reading them.

It's a lot of fun listening to mystery books or crime novels as audiobooks, with good narrators adding suspense and enjoyment to the reading experience. Editors at AudioFile magazine, who specialize in reviewing audiobooks, pick out the best ones of 2023, good books made even better by being read aloud by a skilled narrator.

As summer kicks off in the northern hemisphere, it's a great time to relax and listen to a good audiobook. Michele Cobb, publisher of AudioFile magazine, shares her favourite new audiobooks from the first half of 2023—from cozy mysteries and beach reads to the memoir of an ER doctor during Covid.

With Valentine's Day only days away, it's time to get in the mood for love—and what better way than listening to an audiobook about two people who at first don't get along but then fall madly in love? Emily Connelly, assistant editor of AudioFile magazine, recommends her favourite romance audiobooks.

As well as appearing in many plays and movies, the British actor Timothy West (1934-2024) was a great narrator of audiobooks. He narrated a large number of  Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's works, as well as abridged versions of Simon Schama's History of Britain, a three-volume work. Below, some of the books in his audiobook oeuvre (not all are easy to get hold of or are only available in some countries).