Whether you have 38 minutes to spare or 14 hours, these audiobooks will immerse, enlighten and possibly terrify you.
Blood Orange Night: My Journey to the Edge of Madness
By Melissa Bond. Read by the author.
Bond recently learned that her son has Down syndrome, that she is pregnant with her second child and that she’s fired when she stops sleeping one night. She attributes it to stress and her “geriatric” pregnancy, but the insomnia lingers after her daughter is born. “Maybe I’ll get an hour. Maybe I’ll get 30 minutes or 10 or 12,” says Bond, her voice a source of despair for the duration of this captivating audiobook. “I want to bang my head against the wall for fear that it will happen again, that it will never end and that I will become psychotic and have this feeling of glass in my body forever.”
Bond tries everything she can safely take during pregnancy and after breastfeeding — valerian root tea, yoga, Ambien — and nothing works for long, if at all. By the time they say “Dr. Great,” we know things get worse before they get better. Soon, she’s on six milligrams of Ativan every night (“when they have an epileptic seizure in the emergency room, people with two milligram shot,” she explains, for the scale). It’s this highly addictive, recklessly prescribed benzodiazepine, and not the insomnia, that’s the real villain of this memoir that doubles as a sort of true crime story.
Hearing her son utter his first sentence at 3½, of the breakdown of her marriage, of the facts of this lesser-known class of pharmaceutical dependency, of the sheer terror of her withdrawal, Bond’s dogged self-analysis is skewered through her own body. heart – and ours.
Simon & Schuster Audio, 9 hours, 18 minutes
Olive Grove in Ends
By Moses McKenzie. Read by Louis McKenzie.
McKenzie’s coming-of-age debut is set in an area of Bristol, England, which locals call ‘Ends’ – perhaps the end of the earth or the end of someone’s rope; or, as the narrator surmises, just “trying to get by.” British Jamaican high school student Sayon Hughes is in love with a pastor’s daughter, works hard in the classroom and dreams of owning a house on a hill outside the city.
But in his early adulthood, as his predominantly Jamaican and Somali neighborhood “dilutes” with white people, Sayon has become numb to the lie of upward mobility, dealing drugs and even committing murders to defend his family. Gliding effortlessly between the layered accents and patois of this community, Louis McKenzie reads his brother’s soulful yet precise prose—at one carnival “insignificant dreadlocks stood on sound systems roaring raucous patois at no one in particular”; a drunken couple “spill on the trail like cornmeal over the edge of a pan” – with a tough tenor bursting periodically to reveal the pure heart beneath Sayon’s impure actions.
Little, Brown & Company, 9 hours, 49 minutes
sparring partners
By John Grisham. Read by Jeff Daniels, Ethan Hawke and January LaVoy.
Grisham says he wrote these three rare novella-length legal thrillers while he was “stuck at home with Covid,” and they feel sufficiently straight-forward and distracting for listeners who might find themselves in similar difficulties. In “Homecoming,” Daniels uses his recent incarnation of Atticus Finch to revive Grisham’s longtime lawyer hero Jake Brigance, now engulfed by the extrajudicial plight of an old friend who has gone missing. Hawke reads “Strawberry Moon,” about a death row inmate who has three hours to live; and famed audiobook narrator LaVoy reads the title story, following two brothers—heirs to their imprisoned father’s law firm—and the only person who could save them from mutual destruction. The expert voice acting makes these latest additions to a long body of work worthwhile.
Random House Audio, 9 hours, 57 minutes
An immense world: how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us
By Ed Yong. Read by the author.
“Umwelt”: Derived from the German word for “environment,” the zoological term means not only the environment of an animal, the Pulitzer-winning science writer clarifies in his calmly authoritative Oxbridge accent, but “specifically the part of that environment that an animal can feel and experience – be perceptual world.” After devoting his 2016 book, “I Contain Multitudes,” to the trillions of microbes that make up the human body, Yong now turns his attention to the rest of the animal kingdom, rejecting our human tendency to anthropomorphize other animals. , to frame their abilities and behavior “in terms of our senses rather than theirs.”
Instead, Yong dedicates chapter after chapter to a deep dive into the vast array of sensory perceptions in the animal kingdom, from the sense of smell of dogs to the “exceptional sensitivity of a barn owl’s hearing” to the hibernating ground squirrel’s high tolerance for freezing temperatures. This humble tour reveals the limits of human understanding and leaves you amazed at how much of the world we cannot know.
Random House Audio, 14 hours, 18 minutes
ghost lover
By Lisa Taddeo. Read by a full cast.
In nine stories revolving around unsavory female protagonists, the author of “Three Women” and “Animal” paints a portrait of contemporary white femininity, anchored in celebrity culture, consumerism and narcissistic self-loathing. A “not hot” LA entrepreneur is known for her successful corporate ghostwriting lyrics to potential lovers – while failing to maintain a relationship herself. Three women compete for a politician’s attention during a fundraiser at his LA mansion. A middle-aged Irish immigrant falls madly in love with a man’s concoction on an invite-only dating app. Ultimately unnecessary and yet – or therefore – guiltily entertaining, these amoral tales are flimsy enough to take on vacation; though some disturbing backstories pop up to give the listener something to hold on to.
Simon & Schuster Audio, 6 hours, 56 minutes
Choice: a short story
By Jodi Picoult. Read by Therese Plummer.
A divorced man named James wakes up on the most important morning of his career to find that he is several months pregnant. He is not alone; he finds an emergency clinic in Dallas that is teeming with cisgender men at various stages of pregnancy, with symptoms of nausea and abdominal distention. News anchors report that the phenomenon has overtaken all 50 states, half of which have already stopped abortion care after the overthrow of Roe v. Wade. “But I don’t want a baby,” James tells the midwife. “You should probably have thought of that before you had sex,” she replies bluntly. A podcast-length speculative fable, “Choice,” is read by professional narrator Plummer, whose voice deftly alternates between the dull confusion in James’ head and the keen knowledge of the female characters around him, with an introductory note read by the author .
Audible Originals, 38 minutes
One Person, One Voice: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America
By Nick Seabrook. Read by Reynaldo Piniella.
Seabrook’s lucid exposition of the genesis and evolution of gerrymandering—the deliberate and partisan falsification of district boundaries for electoral advantage—makes a potentially dry, shaky subject accessible and compelling to a wide audience. In the Massachusetts gubernatorial election in 1812, incumbent Elbridge Gerry (pronounced, says Seabrook, with a hard G), tried to secure his re-election by drawing a “snaking, disfigured” Senate district around Essex County, where he knew his “federalist enemies.” planned a coup. Public epithets followed, and the term was born.
But though not mentioned, the actual practice of gerrymandering goes back further to a “thin and callous” governor of colonial North Carolina in the 1730s, and long before that, to the dark British tradition of “rotten boroughs” after Magna Carta. Actor Piniella’s tone is suitably spicy and even biting at times, like an amiable expert smelling a rat.
Random House Audio, 12 hours, 25 minutes
Be My Baby: A Memoir
By Ronnie Spector with Vince Waldron. Read by Rosie Perez.
In this new recording of the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer’s 1990 memoir—with a 2021 postscript written by the author before she passed away in January, as well as a new introduction by Keith Richards—actor and activist Rosie Perez takes us back to the 1960s heyday of the Ronettes, the all-female trio from Washington Heights in New York City that toured with the Rolling Stones and Beatles. The singer, Veronica Bennett, would become Ronnie Spector when she married the band’s producer, Phil Spector, who controlled and abused her for years. Channeled by Perez’s New York accent, Spector recounts her resilient struggle to escape her husband’s grasp and return to hers. In the spirit of the HBO documentary ‘Tina’, this audiobook is gripping and inspiring.
Macmillan Audio, 10 hours, 43 minutes
Lauren Christensen is an editor at the Book Review.
