By Books are great. They're really, really good. You can flip through them, they smell great when they're fresh off the shelf, and if a mate who borrowed one off you folds the corners of the pages over, then you're legally allowed to break one of their fingers.
But audiobooks are great too. For one thing, there aren't any pages to fold the corners of. For another, they're going through a revolution right now, with A-list names signing up to read both new releases and classics from the literary canon. Plus, you get all kinds of extra bits and pieces thrown in for good measure.
In fact – and please don't tell Kazuo Ishiguro we said this – some audiobooks are even better than the actual books. Listen to these and tell us we're wrong.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Broke college grad Emira Tucker babysits the extremely cute toddler Briar for Alix Chamberlain – girlboss motivational speaker and blogger, still trying to pretend she lives in Manhattan even after she and her family have slunk off to Philadelphia for her husband's job – but a deeply weird turn of events at a local supermarket sours things. Emira, who's black, is accused of kidnapping white kid Briar, and though eventually she's rescued, it spurs Alix to try and make Emira her mate. It turns out to be a lot more complicated than Alix realises. It's a really sharp, smart, unflinchingly awkward exploration of the micro-dynamics at play there, as well as motherhood, anxiety and blithe, earnest liberal prejudices.
The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight
On the morning of 20 October 1966, a young girl woke up from a dream. Eryl Mai Jones had seen herself going to school, but when she got there the school was gone. "Something black had come down all over it," she told her mother. By 9.14am her school was covered in coal spoil from tips high on the hillside above her hometown, Aberfan, and Eryl was dead. Sam Knight, occasionally of this parish, tells the stranger than fiction story of a respected psychologist who tried to prove that some people can predict the future, and to build a kind of extra-sensory early warning system for to avert disasters. He goes searching for seers among the British public, and finds his own future rushing to meet him. Knight has an impeccably dry, precise style –"Premonitions are impossible, and they come true all the time. The second law of thermodynamics says it can’t happen, but you think of your mother a second before she calls" – which Julian Rhind-Tutt (the once and future Dr Mac Macartney from Green Wing) captures perfectly.
Good Pop, Bad Pop by Jarvis Cocker
The former Pulp frontman, broadcaster and early stage national treasure has been digging around in his attic to see if he can make sense of his life through the detritus which he's accumulated in his loft. Each object – a letter, bar of soap in a box, a polyester shirt from BHS – has to be either kept or 'cobbed'; that is, thrown out. This is a different kind of life story, one told in shards and pieces as Cocker picks out objects which flesh out his early life in Sixties and Seventies Sheffield. (The story ends here just as he sets off for art college at Central St Martins in 1988, a time when Pulp were still very much cultish John Peel favourites rather than pop titans.) It's full of his usual wry, outsiderish observations and some astute thoughts on how certain things help to democratise culture.
The Last Days of Roger Federer (and Other Endings) by Geoff Dyer
This investigation into the twilight of creative types and sportspeople is full of Dyer's usual joyful, densely packed style, and tries to unpick exactly how things change when experts in their field know that the end is coming. We tour through John Coltrane and Bob Dylan's reworkings of their earlier tunes, Jean Rhys' return from presumed death, JMW Turner's bursts of wild, bright lightscapes and Nietzche's breakdown in Turin, as well as the feather-light touch of our Rog.
Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord
Annie Lord's lyrical, occasionally lacerating dating and relationships columns in Vogue have quickly made her name as the kind of honest writer you feel like you're already friends with. Her debut, Notes on Heartbreak, already has the feeling of a massive hit about it. This memoir dives deep into the break-up which Lord has mined in columns before, and picks apart the slow-motion collapse of a five-year relationship. You're going to see Notes on Heartbreak literally everywhere this summer – the Tube, the park, mates' bookshelves – but hearing it read by Lord, in her Otley tones, adds an extra sense of intimacy.
Don't Laugh, It Will Only Encourage Her by Daisy May Cooper
Perhaps the funniest woman in Britain tells her story of growing up with nothing in rural Gloucestershire and turning it into one of the best sitcoms of the last 20 years. After school Cooper moved to London to attend Rada, which turned out to be an absolutely terrible experience. "Before I went to Rada," she writes, "I wasn’t even aware of the smörgåsbord of ways you could be told how utterly shit you were." She went back to Gloucestershire, moved in with her little brother Charlie, and together they took cleaning jobs while starting to piece together the characters and ideas that would turn into This Country. This one comes with an extra Q&A section where Cooper speaks to her dad Paul.
And Away... by Bob Mortimer
Bob Mortimer's national treasure status has been a long time coming, but between the Athletico Mince podcast, Train Guy, his segments of rambling surrealness on Would I Lie To You? and the gentle reflections on mortality which ripple through Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, he's become everyone's favourite slightly mad uncle. This memoir digs into the frequently bizarre circumstances he's found himself in, whether fending off wolves while working on the bins or becoming known as 'the Cockroach King' during his work prosecuting slum landlords for Lambeth Council. It's his honesty about the shyness and depression which afflicted his life into his twenties which makes it really engrossing, though. And in the audiobook, you've got Bob's impressions and characters right there – his version of taking on Michael Jackson's goons at the Brits in 1996 is lifted immeasurably by his quivering Jarvis Cocker.
Nomadland by Jessica Bruder
With the film just having won a few Oscars – if you've not seen it yet, do seek it out – now's a very good time to get into this extraordinary non-fiction account of the wreckage wreaked by the Great Recession, and the complex ways in which people who have taken to living in cars and vans because their jobs vanished feel about their situation.
"The people I met didn’t think of themselves as victims, and that made them more compelling," Bruder said when we spoke to her in February. "They felt they were doing this by choice, which is a complicated thing because it’s not what you and I might think of as a choice."
What White People Can Do Next by Emma Dabiri
After the protest and soul-searching of last summer, this is a practical, straightforward guide "from allyship to coalition", as the subtitle puts it. Just sitting there feeling bad is, you should probably already realise, not much help to anyone. Instead, Don't Touch My Hair writer Dabiri calls on white allies to drop any last bits of denial, give capitalism a good shake, and lose their guilt to properly get behind antiracism. This is incisive, witty, thoroughly researched stuff.
Beyond by Stephen Walker
The story of Yuri Gagarin's flight into the cosmos is full of absolutely incredible moments, and Stephen Walker's account of the mission and Gagarin's life is vividly told. Here's just one of them: when Gagarin landed back on Earth after becoming the first human to travel through space, he realised he'd landed in a potato field. An old woman and her granddaughter were stood staring at him, apparently halfway through their harvest.
"Don't be afraid," he said. "I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space." He paused. "And I must find a telephone to call Moscow." The grandmother didn't have one, so Gagarin hitched a ride on a cart to the nearest phone.
Later by Stephen King
Eight-year-old Jamie is one of those kids who seems to notice a bit more of the world than most other kids his age. Unlike those other kids who notice a bit more of the world, though, Jamie also notices dead people walking around, and he can chat to them too. Yes, yes – we know. But, we're assured, it's "not like in that movie with Bruce Willis". For one thing, Jamie can only see the dead for a week after their death, and if he asks them a question they cannot lie to him. Naturally, the NYPD want a piece of him. This is classique King.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Nobel laureate's first novel in six years has echoes of his Never Let Me Go in its subtly dystopian setting and genetically-fiddled class strata, but Klara and the Sun wanders down a different road. In a future where children socialise not with each other but with artificially intelligent machines, one machine called Klara learns about the world through the shop window she stands in. She's eventually paired up with a teenager called Josie, who's one of the 'lifted', a genetically engineered genius.
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Two young people meet in a pub in south-east London – she's a dancer, he's a photographer – and both realise they managed to get scholarships to prestigious private schools where they felt like outsiders. They fall in love and feel the pulsating push and pull of the city as it elevates and diminishes them, and fall apart under the pressures that it puts on these young Black artists. This is a vibrant, complex debut which, much like Luster below, gains a lot from being read with a tender intensity by its author. As Nelson told Esquire recently: "Writing, to a degree, is an act of love and should be treated accordingly."
We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins
Bellingcat styles itself as the security agency of the people, and over the last seven years it's published investigations into the most inscrutable events and most hostile organisations – the downing of MH17, the Skripal poisoning, the Christchurch shootings – using a combination of old-fashioned journalistic nous and crowdsourced intelligence and assessment. Founder Eliot Higgins tells the story of how some self-taught sleuths and amateur debunkers collaborated over the internet to become one of the world's most important bulwarks against disinformation, as well as exploring the tools and technology which let Bellingcat draw every byte of information from seemingly innocuous clues.
Luster by Ravel Leilani
Raven Leilani reads her own remarkable, darkly funny debut about Edie, a young Black woman working a dead-end job in New York who finds herself drawn slowly into a middle aged white archivist's sort-of-open marriage. As the punning title implies, there's a deliriously carnal edge to Edie's accounts of hook-ups and entanglements.
"For me the first bits of the book were the body and its needs and the messy way that those needs manifest," Leilani told Esquire recently. "Edie is a young Black woman who wants to be touched and wants to be witnessed." Leilani's reading is the ideal way to feel the intense closeness of Edie's interior life.
Soul Tourists by Bernardine Evaristo
Bored banker Stanley Williams is wondering if trudging to and from his desk each day is all that life has to offer him. Then, he bumps into Jessie at a club. She's a livewire and a loose cannon, and before long Jessie and Stanley are on a road trip across Europe together. But this, it turns out, is no gap year schlepp from hostel to hostel. On their way, they meet the ghosts of some of the great Black Europeans: Mary Seacole, Hannibal of Carthage, Alessandro de Medici of Florence, and more besides all make their presences felt while Stanley and Jessie go on an odyssey into life, death and the states in between. Girl, Woman, Other author Bernardine Evaristo's 2005 novel takes a magpie-like approach to storytelling, mixing scripts with poems with prose with anything else that comes to hand. Evaristo narrates along with Vivienne Acheampong (who you'll have seen in Famalam) and Kayi Ushe.
Shakespeare: The Complete Works
So, say you've suddenly got a lot of time on your hands. Maybe you're doing some power-sanding, or you're flying to Japan, or you're walking Hadrian's Wall. You've almost certainly got more than enough time to take a chunk out of the 99 hours of this compilation of newly digitised versions of all 37 of Shakespeare's plays, recorded across the 20th century. The actors from Marlowe Dramatic Society and Professional Players featured here include: Ian McKellen (obviously), Derek Jacobi (obviously), Diana Rigg (obviously) and many more knights and dames of the realm giving it their thespiest. And you'll not have to put up with anyone sitting near you really guffawing at the gags in A Midsummer Night's Dream just so you know that they get them.
Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more delivered straight to your inbox
