It is my pleasure to present to you 2016’s Best Audiobooks in Fiction as selected by the editors at AudioFile Magazine. This year they selected their top titles in the following categories: Fiction, Nonfiction & Culture, Memoir, Biography & History, Mystery & Suspense, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Children & Family Listening, Young Adult, and Romance. Getting a sneak peak at the list and partnering with AudioFile Magazine in this event is exciting. It also reminds me that Armchair Audies season is right around the corner.
You can get access to the complete list of the best audiobooks by category here. In doing so, you will also be entered to win free audiobooks with a 6-month membership to Audiobooks.com. After looking at these lists, you’ll know just how to use that membership if you win.
Today bring my last installment of AudioFile’s 16 best audiobooks in the Fiction category. Today there are two videos in addition to a sound clip from The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, narrated by Bahni Turpin. Be sure to click on each title to read the AudioFile review.
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
Narrated by Robin Miles
Published by Harper Audio
2 hours and 45 minutes
Running into a long-ago friend sets memories from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything – until it wasn’t.
For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant – a part of a future that belonged to them.
But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.
Grace by Natashia Déon
Narrated by Lisa Renée Pitts
Published by Blackstone Audio
13 hours 41 minutes
For a runaway slave in the 1840s South, life on the run can be just as dangerous as life under a sadistic master. That’s what 15-year-old Naomi learns after she escapes the brutal confines of life on an Alabama plantation. Striking out on her own, she leaves behind her beloved Momma and sister, Hazel, and takes refuge in a Georgia brothel run by a freewheeling, gun-toting Jewish madam named Cynthia. There, amid a revolving door of gamblers, prostitutes, and drunks, Naomi falls into a star-crossed love affair with a smooth-talking white man named Jeremy who frequents the brothel’s dice tables all too often.
The product of Naomi and Jeremy’s union is Josey, whose white skin and blonde hair mark her as different from the other slave children on the plantation. Having been taken in as an infant by a free slave named Charles, Josey has never known her mother, who was murdered at her birth. Josey soon becomes caught in the tide of history when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaches the declining estate, and a day of supposed freedom quickly turns into a day of unfathomable violence that will define Josey – and her lost mother – for years to come.
Narrator Lisa Renée Pitts on Grace by Natashia Déon
Mister Monkey by Francine Prose
Narrated by Kirby Heybourn and Nan McNamara
Published by Harper Audio
9 hours 16 minutes
Mister Monkey – a screwball children’s musical about a playfully larcenous pet chimpanzee – is the kind of family favorite that survives far past its prime. Margot, who plays the chimp’s lawyer, knows the production is dreadful and bemoans the failure of her acting career. She’s settled into the drudgery of playing a humiliating part – until the day she receives a mysterious letter from an anonymous admirer and later, in the middle of a performance, has a shocking encounter with Adam, the 12-year-old who plays the title role.
Francine Prose’s effervescent comedy is told from the viewpoints of wildly unreliable, seemingly disparate characters whose lives become deeply connected as the madcap narrative unfolds. There is Adam, whose looming adolescence informs his interpretation of his role; Edward, a young audience member who is candidly unimpressed with the play; Ray, the author of the novel on which the musical is based, who witnesses one of the most awkward first dates in literature; and even the eponymous Mister Monkey, the Monkey God himself.
The House at the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner
Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini
Published by Random House Audio
14 hours 33 minutes
Castellamare is an island far enough away from the mainland to be forgotten but not far enough to escape from the world’s troubles. At the center of the island’s life is a café draped with bougainvillea called the House at the Edge of Night, where the community gathers to gossip and talk.
Amedeo Esposito, a foundling from Florence, finds his destiny on the island with his beautiful wife, Pina, whose fierce intelligence, grace, and unwavering love guide her every move. An indiscretion tests their marriage, and their children – three sons and an inquisitive daughter – grow up and struggle with both humanity’s cruelty and its capacity for love and mercy.
Spanning nearly a century, through secrets and mysteries, trials and sacrifice, this beautiful and haunting novel follows the lives of the Esposito family and the other islanders who live and love on Castellamare: a cruel count and his bewitching wife, a priest who loves scandal, a prisoner of war turned poet, an outcast girl who becomes a pillar of strength, a wounded English soldier who emerges from the sea. The people of Castellamare are transformed by two world wars and a great recession, by the threat of fascism and their deep bonds of passion and friendship, and by bitter rivalries and the power of forgiveness.
Narrator Edoardo Ballerini on The House at the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Narrated by Bahni Turpin
Published by Random House Audio
10 hours 50 minutes
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Audio Sample
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