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The 11 Best Audiobooks to Listen to in 2021

Photo credit: Columbia
Photo credit: Columbia

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 Martin Amis we said this – some audiobooks are even better than the actual books. Listen to these and tell us we're wrong. We've collected the best of 2021 at the top here.


April

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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."

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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.

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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.

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March

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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.

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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.

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February

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Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

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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."

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We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins

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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.

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Luster by Ravel Leilani

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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.

January

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Soul Tourists by Bernardine Evaristo

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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.

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Shakespeare: The Complete Works

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Look, you've suddenly got a lot more time on your hands. You've almost certainly got more than enough to spend 99 hours with 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.

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