Now that it’s so easy to download them on to a smartphone, audiobooks have become a publishing success. The market leader, audible.co.uk, has more than 200,000 books, new and old, fiction and nonfiction, for no more than £8 a title, regardless of length, when you subscribe.
They are also ideal ways to relax, especially on holiday: weightless and convenient, they save aching arms on the beach and strained eyes in the sunshine. You can even alternate listening and reading on a Kindle by taking advantage of Whispersync, which automatically shifts the download to the page where you stopped reading, and vice versa.
Literary
Two Booker prize contenders are particularly well suited to being heard rather than read. The audiobook of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (Audible, 7hr 27min, £14.99) adds texture and illumination to a polyphonic historical novel. It is voiced by a cast of more than 160, including Susan Sarandon and David Sedaris, as well as Saunders (and even his father). Set in 1862, it tells the story of Abraham Lincoln’s night-time visits to the grave of his 11-year-old son, Willie. The president is watched over by a cast of opinionated, talkative ghosts. Willie is stuck in the Bardo (the Buddhist version of limbo); its other occupants strive to help him to rest in peace.
Audio is also a good way of tackling the sprawling The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Penguin, 16hr 36min, £23.99). Arundhati Roy’s first novel in two decades is thronged with characters from every walk of Indian life. Central are the transgender Anjum, who gropes towards fulfilment by adopting a daughter and finding community among social outcasts in a graveyard in Old Delhi, and the wild-haired architect Tilottama, who is reminiscent of Roy and who rekindles an old affair with Musa, a Kashmiri freedom fighter. Roy narrates, which adds intensity to the cacophony of voices.
Thrillers
Lighter fare is plentiful. All Ian Fleming’s Bond novels are available in new versions read by celebrities: Bill Nighy reads Moonraker (AudioGo, 7hr 28min, £14.99); Martin Jarvis You Only Live Twice (AudioGo, 7hr 33min, £14.99); and David Tennant On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (AudioGo, 8hr 5min, £14.99). To find out about Fleming’s life, get stuck into Andrew Lycett’s biography, Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond (Blackstone Audio, 21hr 46min).
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Who would have thought that a papal election could have you on tenterhooks? Robert Harris’s Conclave (Random House, 8hr 19min, £19.99) turns the factional infighting of the supporters of the competing candidates into a gripping narrative. The narrator, Roy McMillan, catches them perfectly: pompous Venetian, charming African, sly New Englander, harassed Roman dean, all manipulated by the dead Pope’s iron will.
Fantasy
Fantasy is just the thing for summer escapes. Andrew Caldecott’s Rotherweird (WF Howes, 16hr 14min, £24.99, narrated by Kris Dyer) is an imaginative tour de force set in a Kentish town surrounded by the River Rother. Centuries ago ten Elizabethan child prodigies were saved from execution and educated. Their various talents surface in modern Rotherweird, a secretive medieval throwback. Too many bizarrely named characters throng the earliest stage of what will be a trilogy, but persevere: the journey is as much fun as the destination.
If Game of Thrones is your thing, you can compensate for missing episodes by listening to George RR Martin’s unfilmed prequels, three short novellas issued as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (Penguin Random House, 9hr 59min, £12.99), read by Harry Lloyd. It’s set a century earlier, when the Targaryen line still held the Iron Throne and dragons were well known.
Jasper Fforde’s quip-a-minute literary fantasies starring the accident-prone but resourceful literary detective Thursday Next are perkily narrated by Gabrielle Kruger. Start with The Eyre Affair (Hodder, 9hr 10min, £14.99), which introduces Thursday, her pet dodo Pickwick and the zany world of a parallel 1985 in which England is still fighting the Crimean War and Thursday is pitted against the criminal mastermind Acheron Hades. Think Monty Python crossed with Alice in Wonderland.
Crime
Michael Connelly’s The Late Show (Hachette, 9hr 21min, £19.99), narrated by Katherine Moennig, makes good listening and introduces a new heroine: Renée Ballard, a driven young LAPD detective.
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Dry Bones (Blackstone, 10hr 21min, £15.79), narrated by Simon Vance, is the first of Peter May’s books about Enzo Macleod, a forensic scientist who lives in France; solving a ten-year-old crime requires him to criss-cross the country, ending up in the ancient catacombs beneath Paris.
If you prefer your crime cosy, try Monica Ferris’s Crewel World (Blackstone, 7hr 51min), narrated by Susan Boyce, in which Betsy Devonshire begins her crime-solving career by finding out who slew her sister, then makes her sewing shop in a small Minnesotan town the launch pad for detective challenges in a dozen or more sequels.
Classics
Instead of packing hefty volumes of the classics, consider listening. There is a wonderful new dramatisation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (Audible original, 6hr 6min, £19.59), with Emma Thompson narrating, and a cast that includes Eleanor Tomlinson (Demelza in Poldark) as Miss Tilney. Fine too is Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (Hachette, 11hr 31min, £19.99), superbly narrated by Jeremy Irons.
Children
Driving long distances with children is transformed by a good story. Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon series is popular with all ages. The most recent instalment is How to Fight a Dragon’s Fury (7hr 4min, £13.99), brilliantly read, as is the whole series, by David Tennant.
If the new Swallows and Amazons film got your children interested in sailing, try them on Arthur Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea (8hr 4min, £14.99), read by Gareth Armstrong, the seventh in the 12-book series. The intrepid young children’s resources are required when they find themselves floating away from Harwich in a small yacht without a skipper and in dense fog.
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Finally, EB White narrating his own Charlotte’s Web (3hr 35min, £13.99) adds a warm dimension to the classic story of spiders, children and a very talented pig called Wilbur.
Nonfiction
I’m enjoying Robert Ferguson’s brand-new Scandinavians and the Soul of the North (Audible, 15hr 54min, £22.99), a distinctly personal exploration of Scandinavians ancient and modern: the Heimskringla, Quisling, Garbo, Ikea and Lurpak all come into it.
Mark Bowden tells the story of the bloodiest battle of the Vietnam War with the same narrative dynamism that he gave his Black Hawk Down in Hué 1968: A Turning Point in the War in Vietnam (18hr 45min, £33.89).
Finally, for a really long haul Peter H Wilson’s Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (34hr 2min, £54.29) is a timely reminder of Europe’s ancient roots.