Photo-Illustration: Vulture
Every month, audiobook connoisseur Marshall Heyman listens to hours and hours of freshly published novels and nonfiction. He then recommends his favorite new titles, which often include juicy celebrity memoirs, buzzy literary fare, gripping thrillers, sweet romances, thoughtful essays, and even some poetry. He also provides his preferred listening speed for anyone else looking to maximize their audiobook intake. Check back next month for new releases.
Read by: Jenna Coleman
Length: 12 hrs, 38 mins
Speed I listened: 2x
I usually savor a new Jojo Moyes novel in print. This time, I gave her latest a listen, and I loved the experience just as much. In this one, a divorced mom finds herself with a complicated full house when her estranged (and broke) father comes back to live with her, her stepfather, and her daughters. Charming, funny, warm, unexpected — like all of the Jojo Moyes canon, it’s a delight.
Read by: the author
Length: 4 hrs, 56 mins.
Speed I listened: 2x
Everything seemed fine, and then suddenly, on Memorial Day 2019, the writer Geraldine Brooks got a call that her 60-year-old husband, the journalist Tony Horwitz, had dropped dead. This memoir alternates between the history of their marriage and the grief she attempts to work through while on a remote Australian island. Part of what’s thrilling about the audio production is how Brooks’s lyrical accent elevates her lovely and spare prose.
Read by: J. Smith-Cameron
Length: 4 hrs, 23 mins.
Speed I listened: 1.8x
I’ve never been an Anne Tyler reader, but the brisk length of her latest novel made a listen particularly appealing. An added bonus: The book is narrated by actress J. Smith-Cameron from Succession. She’s the awkward mother of a bride who doesn’t really think her daughter should get married to the groom. The weight of this one really sneaks up on you. Or, at least, it snuck up on me.
Read by: Marin Ireland
Length: 8 hrs
Speed I listened: 2x
I’m not a huge fan of the actress Marin Ireland as a narrator. But I found that her voice slipped away whenever the narrative of this family — a Philip Roth-like writer, his artist wife, and their gallerist son — perked up, and that’s quite often. It takes a minute to get used to the form the book takes, as it’s told from several different perspectives. But otherwise, this is a moving and compelling Manhattan story.
Read by: Wil Wheaton
Length: 11 hrs, 41 mins.
Speed I listened: 2x
I’m usually not that keen on a memoir that’s not read by the author, but I’m glad I gave Bill Gates’s new book a pass. (It’s read by the actor Wil Wheaton, who, thanks to narrating Ready Player One and The Martian, has become almost synonymous with heady and slightly dorky audiobooks.) I found Gates’s self-analysis here quite relatable and his journey from precocious kid to major player in the tech world very compelling. My favorite detail is that his favorite drink to order while in college was a Shirley Temple.
I excitedly tore through the nearly 23 hours of Lorne, by Susan Morrison, in a weekend. (I was her assistant for three years.) The surprising grotesquery of Victorian Psycho, by Virginia Feito, made me laugh out loud. Chelsea Handler did too, in her new memoir I’ll Have What She’s Having, which also convinced me I could use a life-lessons master class from the comedian. And I’m always here for thoughtful analysis about gossip, which is why I enjoyed You Didn’t Hear This From Me, by Kelsey McKinney.
Read by: Grover Gardner
Length: 20 hrs, 11 mins.
Speed I listened: 2.1x
I normally bristle at a 20-hour audiobook, but I found this second sequel to Turow’s 1987 thriller Presumed Innocent (first a Harrison Ford movie, which I have seen; more recently, a Jake Gyllenhaal Apple series I haven’t) completely gripping. Early on, I thought Grover Gardner’s voice was a bit fuddy-duddy, but I got used to it. In this installment, our protagonist Rusty chooses to defend his stepson, who is accused of murder. He’s now in his late 70s, and his company is addictive as ever.
Read by: the author
Length: 22 hrs, 9 mins.
Speed I listened: 2x
It’s so unlike me, but here’s another 20-plus-hour audiobook that I couldn’t turn off. Well, that’s not completely true. A few hours into the saga of Griffin — a child actor growing up in New York City in 1980 — I was frustrated that he was caught between the sexual advances of two adults, one an older female family friend, the other his wrestling coach. But the book takes off when Griffin is cast in a movie by a Woody Allen–esque director. Ross, a former child actor himself, is an engaging reader of what must be a semi-autobiographical roman à clef.
Read by: Marin Ireland and others
Length: 9 hrs, 52 mins.
Speed I listened: 2.2x
For a while, the actress Marin Ireland was reading every big audiobook, and I just got tired of listening to her voice. So it’s a testament to the author and this novel that I found it so compelling. The book, a Reese Witherspoon pick about a best-selling writer and her hidden, tumultuous past, shares some similar DNA with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (which I loved), and that’s definitely not a bad thing.
Read by: the author
Length: 5 hrs, 35 mins.
Speed I listened: 1.9x
I thought the actress/singer Lola Kirke was great in Mozart in the Jungle and Mistress America. I had a fun afternoon writing about her when I worked at The Wall Street Journal. But in the last few years, she’s dropped off the Hollywood scene. She focused more on country music and, one assumes, writing this very honest, sometimes even shocking, book of essays about growing up in New York City in a dysfunctional family of eccentrics. In fact, the most pedestrian thing about the book is the title. Otherwise, Kirke comes off wise and introspective. She even got under my skin.
Read by: the author
Length: 8 hrs, 4 mins.
Speed I listened: 2.1x
I didn’t want to like this memoir by the actor behind the voice of Olaf in Frozen and from The Book of Mormon, but almost immediately, Gad won me over. Or, Sacha Baron Cohen did, reading a short foreword in which the artist sometimes known as Borat says he’s wearing “very noisy clogs.” Gad is pretty name-droppy. Friends include Anne Hathaway, Bryce Dallas Howard, Johnny Depp, the late Chadwick Boseman, and pretty much anyone with whom he’s ever co-starred. Besides Cohen, Mel Brooks and Ron Howard pop in for seemingly unnecessary vocal cameos. But Gad is awfully charming, whether he’s detailing his tempestuous relationship with stage director James Lapine, his rise on the high-school forensics circuit, or his endearing emotions toward his growing daughters. We’d probably be friends, too. Josh — call me.
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, by Emma Knight, is a charming novel about the British class system and coming of age at college in Scotland.
In the department of challenging relationships between daughters and their mothers, I enjoyed both the singer Neko Case’s The Harder I Fight the More I Love You and Shari Franke’s The House of My Mother, as painful as both could occasionally be.
