Audiobook of the year
The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey, read by Ben Onwukwe and Vivienne Acheampong (Whole Story, 7hr 37min)
Monique Roffey’s wise and arrestingly poetic tale of a barnacled mermaid’s friendship with a Caribbean fisherman has a narration shared between a laid-back Ben Onwukwe (of London’s Burning) as the fisherman and a touchingly vulnerable Vivienne Acheampong (of Dahl’s The Witches) as the mermaid. Mortal danger from predatory Yankees threatens, but after some wry reflections on human nature, love and kindness prevails in this novel, which won the Costa Book of the Year award in January.
Best celebrity reading
The Carpet People by Terry Pratchett, read by David Tennant (Penguin, 5hr 2min)
David Tennant always triples the value of a title with his exuberant narration, and his new reading of Terry Pratchett’s first book heralds the release over the next two years of new unabridged audiobook versions of all Pratchett’s novels. Bubbling with Pratchett’s inimitable imagination and wit, The Carpet People tells of the minuscule but intrepid Munrung brothers’ battle in the perilous world of the Carpet against the all-conquering mouls, dodging the terrible Fray in a forest of hairs.
Best special effects
The Sandman Act II by Neil Gaiman (Audible Original, 13hr 47min)
The Sandman Act II is even better than the first instalment of the audio version of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series; once again we enjoy the impressive sound effects of Dirk Maggs and music by James Hannigan. It is read by a galaxy of stars including James McAvoy (Morpheus), Miriam Margolyes (Despair), Bill Nighy (Odin), Joanna Lumley (Lady Constantine), Regé-Jean Page (Orpheus), Michael Sheen (Lucifer), David Tennant (Loki), Lorelei King (Aunt Dora) and Barry Humphries (the Beachcomber). Neil Gaiman narrates with relish.
Best poetry reading
War Music written and read by Christopher Logue (Laurence Aston, 4hr 49min)
Just resurrected from the BBC archives, War Music is written and spoken by Christopher Logue (1926-2011), poet, playwright, soldier and pacifist. He worked for 40 years on this idiosyncratic take on Homer’s Iliad, which features startling anachronisms to drive home modern analogies. “Never was blood bloodier or fate more fatal,” pronounced Louis MacNeice. Logue delivers his verse proudly, with all the rat-a-tat-tat of a machinegun, drawing in the listener irresistibly.
Best non-fiction, written and read by . . .
12 Bytes: How We Got Here, Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson (Penguin, 8hr 59min)
“Dry as dust I don’t do,” says the novelist Jeanette Winterson, and proves it with electrifying brio as she delivers 12 Bytes: How We Got Here, Where We Might Go Next. It is an unpredictable mix of enthusiasm for and castigation of the arcane new world of artificial intelligence, transhumanism and robotics. Lively, frequently laugh-aloud funny, and sounding more like podcasts or Ted talks than written prose, the 12 essays use a combination of history, literature, religion, science fiction and electronics to extend our mental horizons.
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Best resurrected classic
A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes, read by Samuel L Jackson (Penguin, 5hr 27min)
This black comedy and crime thriller was published in 1957. A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes is an action-packed romp set in “a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish”. Through it stumbles short, fat Jackson “with purple-red gums and pearly white teeth made for laughing”, naively convinced that his girlfriend Imabelle is true to him. “Everything was in pantomime,” Himes wrote at one point, and narrator Samuel J Jackson makes the most of such larger than life characters as Goldie, Jackson’s transvestite twin, a junkie who guides events by posing as Sister Gabriel. Himes ices his provocative diatribe against inequality with a tongue-in-cheek fairytale ending.
Best children’s book
Noah’s Gold by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, read by Finnian Garbutt (Macmillan, 5hr 55min)
Frank Cottrell-Boyce, scriptwriter of the 2012 London Olympic opening ceremony, is to my mind the most satisfyingly exciting writer for children of our times. Noah’s Gold dumps a minibus and six children on a remote Irish island where its technocidal hero wrecks the worldwide web and hunts buried treasure. Forget Lord of the Flies; these children discover teamwork and mutual support are key to survival. Finnian Garbutt tumbles breathlessly through the ingeniously wrought tale, making the most of its jokes and its lessons.
Best biography
The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough written and read by Hugo Vickers (Hodder, 11hr 51min)
In 1977 Hugo Vickers discovered the Vanderbilt heiress whose fortune saved Blenheim Palace in a psychiatric hospital. His own reading of his revised biography The Sphinx does belated justice to the remarkable Gladys Deacon, who married the 9th Duke of Marlborough in 1921, and whose brilliant mind, classical profile and “soft, elixir ways, half sphinx, half medusa” made her a valued friend of the art historians Bernard and Mary Berenson, Marcus Proust and Anatole France. What makes this audiobook spine-tingling is that in 1977 he recorded her by then corvine voice, and we can hear her talking to him in his hectically narrated but enthralling book.
Best historical fiction
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, read by Pippa Bennett-Warner (Penguin, 11hr 11min)
“Do words mean different things to men and women?” Pip Williams poses searching questions in The Dictionary of Lost Words. The novel begins in the 1880s with a small child under a table in James Murray’s north Oxford garden shed. Esme Nicholl hoards accidentally dropped entries for the Oxford English Dictionary in her treasure trunk and grows up enchanted by words. This is an elegantly constructed love story full of memorable characters: Esme’s clumsily well-meaning lexicographer father, her brusque godmother Edith, whisky-toting actress and suffragette Tilda, and the wonderfully steadfast compositor Gareth. Pippa Bennett-Warner captures them all, and her warm, slightly husky voice enhances the magic.
Best thriller
Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka, read by Adam Sims (Penguin, 13hr 54min)
Bullet Train is a knockabout black comedy with a plot as fast moving as the express train from Tokyo to Morioka on which the action takes place. The central character is the Prince, a cherub-faced but evil 13-year-old boy who evades a trained assassin set on vengeance and cleverly manipulates the gangsters he finds travelling on the train including Tangerine, who gets his philosophy from Dostoevsky and Virginia Woolf, and Lemon, who gets his from Thomas the Tank Engine. Narrator Adam Sims adopts a splendidly energetic delivery with drily ominous overtones.
Feelgood novel
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A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson, read by Maggie Huculak, Tajja Isen and Ian Lake (Penguin, 7hr 32min)
Mary Lawson publishes sparely because she is a perfectionist and A Town Called Solace, set in her beloved northern Ontario, comes close to perfection. Narrators Maggie Huculak, Tajja Isen and Ian Lake are well matched to the characters they voice: eight-year-old Clara, frantic at the disappearance of her teenage sister Rose, but comforted by the ritual of caring for her neighbour Mrs Orchard’s eccentric cat Moses; Elizabeth Orchard herself, patient but tart, living out her last days in hospital conversing with her dead husband, and reflecting on the mistake she made in becoming too important to her neighbour’s neglected little boy; and the boy himself Liam, now in his thirties, who upsets Clara’s world by moving into Mrs Orchard’s house and disturbing its sacred lining of memories.
