The 10 Best Audiobooks of 2023
My audiobook listening is almost wholly aimed at escapism and diversion, something to help me get through the drudgery of an afternoon beating back the knotweed attempting to take over my backyard. Not that the occasional classic or chewy nonfiction doesn’t sneak its way onto my playlist, but the audiobooks I listen to have to be more than just a little bit fun. I hope you’ll enjoy these as much as I did.
A juicy combo of mob thriller and Dickensian saga, this novel begins with a Mercedes plowing through a homeless encampment in Delhi, then traces the origins of the car’s driver—a low-caste rural boy who, through a series of fortunate misfortunes, ends up as a bodyguard to the son of a fabulously wealthy crime family. Age of Vice is a bit too long in the way some Victorian novels are, a flaw in terms of art, but a pleasure for anyone who longs to immerse themself in an expansive yarn. Athavale handles the huge cast of characters with a low-key dexterity that delivers a seamless experience.
Penguin Random House Audio released new recordings of most of Borges’ work this year, much of it narrated by Castulo Guerra. There’s an earlier, abridged version of Collected Fictions performed by George Guidall, and the comparison is fascinating. Guidall’s Borges is crisper and emphasizes the master’s ironic side. Guerra’s soft, almost slushy voice features better Spanish pronunciations and plays up Borges’ melancholy romanticism. Both are well worth a listen, and having so much of Borges’ work available on audio is one of the unanticipated treasures 2023 brought.
With two Pulitzers under his belt, Whitehead has embarked on a quixotic quest to become a crackling genre novelist à la Richard Stark, a pseudonym of Donald Westlake. Crook Manifesto is the second book to feature the central character of Ray Carney, who owns a furniture store in Harlem during the 1970s and who, apart from occasionally acting as a fence for stolen goods, tries—and fails—to stay out of trouble. Like all great crime fiction, Crook Manifesto offers up a rich portrait of a time and place and the rules that govern both, often fully visible only to the people who break them. The legendary narrator Dion Graham does as stellar a job with this book as he did with its prequel, 2021’s Harlem Shuffle.
One caveat: This audio adaptation of Bechdel’s beloved comic strip is marred by annoyingly arch voice-over narration by Jane Lynch. Ignore that, and savor the excellent performances of such iconic characters as the neurotically overthinking Mo (Carrie Brownstein, perfect) and the womanizing swashbuckler Lois (Roberta Colindrez, swoon-worthy). A fond, teasing portrait of an abiding subculture, the strip, which began in 1983, still feels surprisingly relevant, from Mo’s rants about the catastrophic state of the world to the meals replete with root vegetables and legumes to the characters’ hilariously Byzantine love lives.
This charming fantasy adventure is presented as the field notes of an early 20th-century Cambridge scholar of dryadology—the study of “the Folk.” The introverted Emily plans to write an ambitiously comprehensive reference work on the subject. Her research expedition to a hamlet in Norway is complicated by the arrival of an intrusive colleague whom Emily suspects of being not quite human and a misguided attempt at do-gooding that leaves her unwillingly betrothed to the king of winter. Fawcett’s richly visual imagination and a pleasant love story that’s blessedly light on shopworn romance tropes sweeten the pot. Potter glides smoothly from Emily’s prim, plummy Oxbridge accent to the Scandinavian villagers she befriends to the appropriately eerie Folk.
Hand’s novel, authorized by Shirley Jackson’s estate, takes place in the disturbing mansion where The Haunting of Hill House is set. While Jackson’s novel features a collection of misfits researching paranormal phenomena and longing for community, Hand’s are a pack of squabbling artists assembled to work on a play about a woman executed for witchcraft. Each struggles to assert their own creative vision on the project while the house itself craftily drives wedges between them. Monda, who also narrates Hand’s terrific Cass Neary crime novels, brings the husky magnificence of her voice to bear on the foolish mortals and the malevolent mansion to equally wondrous effect.
Who wants to listen to a 23-hour recording of the findings of a congressional committee? Not, I thought, me—especially after I’d already watched the televised hearings several times and written about them. Yet, an hour into this production, I was hooked all over again by the astounding and infuriating spectacle of that combination of reality TV, full-on constitutional crisis, and overall shit show that was the final months of the Trump presidency. The introduction, written and read by New Yorker editor David Remnick, provides a lucid overview, while the bulk of the findings are narrated by an array of top-notch professionals.
A Western that jettisons the standard motifs of the genre, this horror novel follows the fortunes of Adelaide Henry, who in 1915 burns down her family’s farmhouse in California and heads for Montana, where the federal government is handing out 320-acre homesteads. There, Adelaide, who is Black, finds more acceptance than she anticipates in the tiny community forming amidst the vast emptiness of the plains, including other unmarried women like herself. But Adelaide comes bearing a deadly secret that can’t be kept hidden forever. Abbott-Pratt’s quietly powerful narration summons the isolation that Adelaide both seeks and longs to escape in Montana’s badlands.
Gerard Doyle has narrated all of Mick Herron’s Slough House spy novels, the basis for the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses. This stand-alone book touches on the characters from the main series only occasionally, but it has the same amused interest in government and intelligence careers gone wrong and in strivers on the margins trying to work their way up while the people in charge concoct elaborate and usually doomed schemes to thwart their rivals. This story involves an explosive file that somehow gets passed to a sidelined civil servant in a supermarket. Doyle’s delicate, world-weary voice is the perfect vehicle for Herron’s espionage fiction, which manages to be witty and twisty even as it second-guesses the cleverness and heroism of spies themselves.
Converse was a strikingly original singer-songwriter who hung around the New York City folk music scene in the heyday of the 1950s before, discouraged by her inability to break through, she moved to Michigan. In 1974, after working on a novel and as a political activist, she packed up her car and disappeared, never to be heard from again. This mystery, and the poignancy of her music, caused a sort of cult fandom to grow up around Converse. Fishman, who narrates this audiobook, was riveted from the moment he heard one of her songs at a party. A musician himself, he became obsessed with Converse, and this fascinating book is the story of his quest to understand her enigmatic life and outsider art. He is the only choice to narrate this story, and the audiobook is inestimably deepened by the inclusion of clips from Converse’s haunting recordings.
