Best new audio books — goals, gothic horror and a very wild West

Summer has been slow to start, but at least we have sport to console us. Do not adjust your set if the sight of footballers, cyclists and tennis players leaves you cold: this is still a column about books. And Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin (Fourth Estate, 12 hrs 31 mins) is about so much more than football, even if the game’s incarnation as a seemingly bottomless global money-spinner provides its engine.

The novel is split between two narrators: the perennially perplexed Mark Wolfe (read by Kirby Heyborne), an angst-ridden technical writer from Pittsburgh who suddenly finds himself commandeered by his deadbeat half-brother to make a fortune by tracking down the next Lionel Messi (the elusive Godwin of the title, apparently waiting to be discovered somewhere in Africa); and Mark’s embattled boss Lakesha (read by Karen Chilton), who is stuck back home fighting for control of a seethingly discontented writers’ collective.

It’s in these two cleverly complicated voices that O’Neill’s big themes of postcolonial racial inequality and contemporary versions of indentured labour emerge, and they also make for a highly entertaining and absorbing audio performance.

Mark’s continual bafflement, his brother’s gauche appropriation of Black street talk, Lakesha’s sardonic attempts to fend off her usurpers, and a shady super-agent’s cod-philosophical musings all contribute to the novel’s comic register — but O’Neill’s tonal control means the narrators can also allow the story’s seriousness to seep through, often catching the listener unawares. You really don’t have to be a football fan to enjoy this superior cultural analysis of a sport that has seen itself transformed into a high-speed gravy train.

Speed is also of the essence in Kevin Barry’s mesmerising The Heart in Winter (Canongate, 5 hrs 54 mins), in which the Irish writer shakes up the Western genre with such rapidity and deftness that the listener might feel almost as giddy as one of the novel’s protagonists, Tom Rourke, after the epic pub crawl that sets the narrative in motion. I first read this book in print, and loved its wildness and virtuosity so much that I knew I wanted to listen to it — and, having heard the author read at a live event, I suspected there would be no need for a professional voice artist.

It is brilliantly done: a capering story, set in small-town Montana during a 19th-century mining boom, with a pair of lovers on the run. Barry intones their flight from debt, an arranged marriage and an ill-conceived arson attack with a rumbling plangency reminiscent of a ballad, alternating between fast-paced incident and growling menace. Somehow that tone manages to encompass fantastical elements — a scene involving hallucinogens taken on a forest floor would put you on the straight and narrow for good — and a real sense of what it might have been like to lead such a precarious and contingent life in a newly emerging society.

Staying in the past, I found myself deliciously immersed in Elizabeth Macneal’s The Burial Plot (Picador, 9 hrs 58 mins), a creepy early-Victorian thriller with a touch of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith about it. It draws on a real 19th-century predicament: London’s shortage of graves in which to bury its dead, a macabre deficit that partners in love and crime Bonnie and Crawford seek to turn to their advantage. Infiltrating the household of an idiosyncratic, grieving widower with land to spare, the pair — or, rather, the secretive and conniving Crawford, who holds Bonnie in his thrall — set to turning a country estate into a new necropolis, lining their pockets in the process.

Actor Olivia Vinall — who took a leading role in the 2018 small-screen adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, so knows how to deliver gothic horror — does an excellent job of creating and modulating the novel’s claustrophobic atmosphere and its savage twists and turns.

And finally, a piece of non-fiction, although whether one thinks of Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (Penguin Audio, 7 hrs 47 mins) as a memoir, a tranche of literary history or a philosophical and scientific inquiry is very much up for grabs. In the course of this compact but capacious book, Flanagan draws on some of the family history he fictionalised in his Booker-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, examining his father’s life as a prisoner of war in Japan. The dropping of the atomic bomb meant that his father, who was close to death, was released and lived to ensure Flanagan’s own existence; how to square that with the mass annihilation of so many lives?

Flanagan reads with immense sensitivity and care, weighing the unfathomable moral calculus that war and violence beget, alongside truly moving vignettes of his upbringing, his relationship with his parents and their deaths. Woven in are portraits of atomic scientists, of the perpetrators of war crimes, of survivors and — unexpectedly — of the writers HG Wells and Rebecca West. At moments you can almost hear Flanagan’s astonishment at the depth of his material, and of the suffering he recounts; and yet he is such a powerful narrator that there are also moments of joy and wonder.

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