The New York Times Best Seller list is among the most popular and definitive sources. Every major bookseller has a section on their site, making it easy for customers to buy all the e-books and audiobooks listed. If you want to listen to a new audiobook or discover a new author, the New York Times has just listed their Top Audiobooks of 2024.
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James: A Novel
Several times throughout this retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the titular enslaved man (Twain’s Jim), a white character notices James’s standard English cadence with shock and asks: “Why are you talking like that?” With impressive comedic timing and vocal agility, Hoffman skips nimbly between James’s natural eloquence and the “slave filter” he uses to hide it from white people, deepening a project that hinges on vernacular as both signifier and tool of liberation.
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All Fours: A Novel
45-year-old “workaholic” with a husband, child and an unspecified “creative” career embarks on a solo cross-country road trip but never makes it more than half an hour from home, thanks to a sexy young Hertz employee who washes her car windows and is worth sacrificing not just a vacation but an entire life. July, a multi-hyphenate fiction writer, filmmaker, actor and artist whose “minor celebrity” seems comparable to her protagonist’s, reads her feverish and hedonistic new novel in what feels like one breath, her raspy monotone barreling through a motel-room affair, flashbacks of her child’s near-fatal birth and existential negotiations with her evolving sexuality, motherhood, perimenopause and mortality.
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The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
This Odyssean account of an 18th-century maritime expedition in search of the Northwest Passage puts Capt. James Cook’s contributions — to the British Empire, modern cartography, Western perceptions and misperceptions of Polynesian history and culture — in a 21st-century context. Noble reads the full range of Cook’s anthropological and environmental encounters in the two and a half years he was at sea with the same pathos and subtlety he gives to Sides’s deep considerations of Cook’s command, curiosity and intellect — and of the shifts in temper that would arguably cost him his life.
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Rejection: Fiction
An ensemble cast reads this outrageous collection of linked stories with characters in varying degrees of disgusting, degraded, dangerous: an incel with narrow shoulders and a meek voice who boasts, “if not feminist values per se, the value of feminist values”; a gay Asian man whose sexuality remains only “theoretical” until the very end, when he spells out an excruciating, half-hour-long sexual fantasy for a custom-order porn site; a late-20-something publishing admin who licks her romantic wounds by committing casual racism in a tonally flawless group chat. This group of narrators does justice to both Tulathimutte’s impressive control of language and to the individual psyches that make each of his characters wholly distinct.
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From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir
When she died in 2023, Presley left behind an unfinished memoir and hours of interviews she recorded for it, shards of a life that have been gathered into a tortured and mesmerizing whole by her daughter. It is the story of a little girl who has everything she wants except, eventually, her father, who is sexually abused and thrown out of school and falls hopelessly in love again and again and again. Presley’s life is so slippery and complex it feels right to hear it through a prism of multiple viewpoints. Roberts gives a pained and powerful expression to Presley’s writing; Keough fills in the gaps with her memories, her delicate voice laden with fresh grief, and Presley’s recordings interrupt with the haunting effect of a ghost.
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Long Island: A Novel
Ronan, who starred in the 2015 movie adaptation of Tóibín’s 2009 novel, reprises her role as the whip-smart and plucky Irish émigré Eilis Lacey, who in 1951 travels by steamer across the Atlantic, dividing her attention and sympathy between two homes that are no longer quite. In her gentle, stoic delivery, Ronan renders Eilis’s dramas large and small — the Brooklyn boardinghouse where her crippling loneliness morphs slowly into a gossipy sort of community; her accounting aspirations; her Italian American suitor and the wrenching pain of loss — as matters of great sentiment, humour and dignity.
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Health and Safety: A Breakdown
Reading her memoir of sex, drugs and late-stage capitalism from a foreboding, almost deadpan remove, Witt’s voice cracks (as far as I can tell) only once, but her vocal restraint itself signals the tenderness of her wounds. This audiobook retraces Witt’s steps through three overlapping plotlines: her relationship with a tall, “unkempt,” unstable computer programmer named Andrew, her immersion in the Brooklyn rave scene, and her growing dismay over the first Trump presidency. After years of sharing a fourth-floor walk-up, so many drug trips (“mostly the classics: LSD, MDMA, mushrooms, ketamine”) and a general disdain for anything that smells of “the totalizing ideological stranglehold of capitalism,” as one rave poster puts it, the couple implode — and their comedown feels as inevitable as the political and epidemiological circumstances that surround it.
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Whale Fall: A Novel
n a remote island off Wales in the early years of World War II, 18-year-old Manod faces the unappealing prospect of becoming a fisherman’s wife until she is hired by a pair of English ethnographers, Edward and Joan, as their translator and general assistant. Reading Manod’s narration, Keyworth’s voice throughout this short and atmospheric audiobook is both soft and melancholy, slipping quickly between English and Welsh as she conveys the dramas of the teenager’s love life, her limited window onto the dishonesty of her employers’ cross-cultural “research” and the gray isolation that surrounds her.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.