Best Audiobooks of All Time

Obama's memoir of her life, from the South Side of Chicago to the White House. Read by Obama herself in a performance that won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. You hear exactly who she is — warm, precise, occasionally furious. The audio adds immeasurable dimension.

Noah's memoir of growing up mixed-race in apartheid South Africa, where his very existence was illegal. Noah's multi-accent performance — switching between South African English, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, and others — makes this untranslatable to print. The audio is the definitive version.

Fey's comedy memoir reads on the page; Fey's comedy performance is a different animal. The delivery transforms good jokes into great ones and reveals timing that punctuation can't capture. Fey proves she is primarily a performer, secondarily a writer.

Didion's memoir of the year following her husband's sudden death. The prose is already incantatory — grief circling back on itself — and the audio performance respects its rhythm. A book that requires your full attention and rewards it completely.

Podehl's narration of Rothfuss's epic is widely considered the gold standard of single-narrator fantasy audio. He gives each character a distinct voice and makes Rothfuss's already-beautiful prose even more musical. Fantasy listeners cite this as the reason to get into audiobooks.

Both versions are extraordinary. Fry's warmth suits the Englishness of the world; Dale won multiple Grammy Awards for his American recordings. The Harry Potter audiobooks converted a generation of adults who claimed not to be audiobook people.

Adams's absurdist comedy requires perfect timing — and Fry has it. The combination of Adams's wordplay and Fry's delivery is so natural it sounds like one person's voice. The definitive version of an already-perfect book.

Dotrice holds the Guinness World Record for most character voices in an audiobook — over 200 distinct characters in A Game of Thrones. His performances are the reason audiobook listeners argue that ASOIAF works better as audio than in print.

A brief history of humankind — from the cognitive revolution to the present. Harari's ideas are dense but lucid; Perkins' measured narration makes the most complex passages land cleanly. Exceptional commute book — makes traffic genuinely time well spent.

The murder of the Clutter family in rural Kansas and the killers' capture. Brick's narration of Capote's dark, novelistic true crime matches the book's chilling tone exactly. For anyone who got into true crime podcasts and wants the original form.

Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family and was never sent to school. She earned a PhD from Cambridge. Whelan's narration captures the wonder and the damage of that journey. One of the most recommended audiobooks in existence for good reason.

The story of the Great Migration — six million Black Americans who left the South between 1915 and 1970. Robin Miles delivers Wilkerson's massive, compassionate history with the gravity it demands. The audio makes the oral-history roots of the writing audible.

Doerr's Pulitzer Prize winner is already a novel of sound — a blind girl, a German boy who loves radio. Appelman's French and German voices are authentic, and the two-page chapter structure makes for perfect audio pacing. Start anywhere and can't stop.

Abraham Lincoln grieves his son in a graveyard populated by ghosts. Saunders' experimental novel features 166 narrators in the audio version — Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Carrie Brownstein, and many more. A book that was written for this format.

Herbert's epic sci-fi novel is famously difficult to enter — the audio, with a full cast providing different voices for the book's many factions, makes the politics and mythology easier to track. The version to recommend to people who bounced off Dune in print.

Kramer and Reading split male and female POV chapters in Sanderson's epic — a partnership that spans the entire Cosmere. Their performances are consistent across tens of thousands of pages. For epic fantasy readers, they are the voices of the genre.

Two unreliable narrators performed by two different actors. The gender division adds a layer of performance that the page-switching format can't replicate — you hear each character lying in their own voice, which makes the twist more visceral.

Ten strangers are trapped on an island and murdered one by one. Stevens' tightly controlled narration of Christie's most suspenseful novel adds the ominous weight the premise demands. The best-selling mystery novel in history, finally in its best format.

Bray's performance of Mark Watney's survival narration is pitch-perfect comedy. Watney's voice in the novel is already distinctive; Bray amplifies every joke and sells the science-problem tension. The ideal first audiobook for comedy-thriller readers.

The oral history format — everyone in the band being interviewed — was built for audio. The full cast of 20 narrators delivers the documentary feel Reid intended. The audio is definitively the better version of an already-excellent book.

Campbell's Southern accent and emotional restraint suits Kya Clark's voice perfectly — a woman who grew up speaking to birds and the marsh before she spoke to people. The rural Carolina setting is more vivid in audio than on the page.

Newbern's dry delivery of Ove's grumpiness is exactly right — all the humor and the sadness underneath it in perfect balance. Swedish coziness translates seamlessly into audio. Ideal for drives or household tasks when you want company that makes you feel good.

Manville's dry, warm British delivery suits Osman's comedy-mystery perfectly. Four retirement community residents solving murders — and Manville makes each of them distinct and hilarious. Best listened to while doing something pleasant.

A scientist wakes alone on a spaceship with no memory of why he's there. Porter's performance of the gradual memory reconstruction — and his portrayal of the alien character Rocky — is one of the most praised narrator performances of the decade.

Prebble's narration of Stevens the butler — so proper, so precise, so completely unable to say what he means — captures Ishiguro's irony in a way that requires only hearing. The emotional repression that defines the novel is audible in every pause Prebble takes.