5 Great Audiobooks to Listen to This Month

Every month, audiobook connoisseur Marshall Heyman listens to hours and hours of freshly published novels and nonfiction. He then recommends his favorite new titles, which often include juicy celebrity memoirs, buzzy literary fare, gripping thrillers, sweet romances, thoughtful essays, and even some poetry. He also provides his preferred listening speed for anyone else looking to maximize their audiobook intake. Check back next month for new releases.

January Picks

Presumed Guilty, by Scott Turow

Read by: Grover Gardner
Length: 20 hrs, 11 mins.
Speed I listened: 2.1x

I normally bristle at a 20-hour audiobook, but I found this second sequel to Turow’s 1987 thriller Presumed Innocent (first a Harrison Ford movie, which I have seen; more recently, a Jake Gyllenhaal Apple series I haven’t) completely gripping. Early on, I thought Grover Gardner’s voice was a bit fuddy-duddy, but I got used to it. In this installment, our protagonist Rusty chooses to defend his stepson, who is accused of murder. He’s now in his late 70s, and his company is addictive as ever.

$35 at Amazon

Playworld, by Adam Ross

Read by: the author
Length: 22 hrs, 9 mins.
Speed I listened: 2x

It’s so unlike me, but here’s another 20-plus-hour audiobook that I couldn’t turn off. Well, that’s not completely true. A few hours into the saga of Griffin — a child actor growing up in New York City in 1980 — I was frustrated that he was caught between the sexual advances of two adults, one an older female family friend, the other his wrestling coach. But the book takes off when Griffin is cast in a movie by a Woody Allen–esque director. Ross, a former child actor himself, is an engaging reader of what must be a semi-autobiographical roman à clef.

$23.63 at Amazon

The Three Lives of Cate Kay, by Kate Fagan

Read by: Marin Ireland and others
Length: 9 hrs, 52 mins.
Speed I listened: 2.2x

For a while, the actress Marin Ireland was reading every big audiobook, and I just got tired of listening to her voice. So it’s a testament to the author and this novel that I found it so compelling. The book, a Reese Witherspoon pick about a best-selling writer and her hidden, tumultuous past, shares some similar DNA with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (which I loved), and that’s definitely not a bad thing.

$17.05 at Amazon

Wild West Village, by Lola Kirke

Read by: the author
Length: 5 hrs, 35 mins.
Speed I listened: 1.9x

I thought the actress/singer Lola Kirke was great in Mozart in the Jungle and Mistress America. I had a fun afternoon writing about her when I worked at The Wall Street Journal. But in the last few years, she’s dropped off the Hollywood scene. She focused more on country music and, one assumes, writing this very honest, sometimes even shocking, book of essays about growing up in New York City in a dysfunctional family of eccentrics. In fact, the most pedestrian thing about the book is the title. Otherwise, Kirke comes off wise and introspective. She even got under my skin.

$12.46 at Amazon

In Gad We Trust, by Josh Gad

Read by: the author
Length: 8 hrs, 4 mins.
Speed I listened: 2.1x

I didn’t want to like this memoir by the actor behind the voice of Olaf in Frozen and from The Book of Mormon, but almost immediately, Gad won me over. Or, Sacha Baron Cohen did, reading a short foreword in which the artist sometimes known as Borat says he’s wearing “very noisy clogs.” Gad is pretty name-droppy. Friends include Anne Hathaway, Bryce Dallas Howard, Johnny Depp, the late Chadwick Boseman, and pretty much anyone with whom he’s ever co-starred. Besides Cohen, Mel Brooks and Ron Howard pop in for seemingly unnecessary vocal cameos. But Gad is awfully charming, whether he’s detailing his tempestuous relationship with stage director James Lapine, his rise on the high-school forensics circuit, or his endearing emotions toward his growing daughters. We’d probably be friends, too. Josh — call me.

$15.74 at Amazon

Also Worth a Listen

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, by Emma Knight, is a charming novel about the British class system and coming of age at college in Scotland.

In the department of challenging relationships between daughters and their mothers, I enjoyed both the singer Neko Case’s The Harder I Fight the More I Love You and Shari Franke’s The House of My Mother, as painful as both could occasionally be.