Best summer books of 2024: Audio books

Long Island by Colm Tóibín, read by Jessie Buckley (Picador)

Tóibín reprises the story of Brooklyn’s Eilis Lacey 20 years on, as she returns from America to her hometown of Enniscorthy in County Wexford for the first time. Much has changed — not least Eilis herself — and Buckley captures perfectly her tentative and conflicted reactions to the people and the place she once knew so well.

You Are Here by David Nicholls, read by Lee Ingleby and Lydia Leonard (WF Howes)

You don’t have to be on a walking holiday to step into the boots of hikers Michael and Marnie, thrown together by circumstance and each facing their own challenges. As they tramp over the moors in weather both literally and figuratively variable, we too wonder if they’ll stay the distance. Both readers give lovely, layered performances that move between the story’s humour and poignancy.

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, read by Cassandra Campbell (Little, Brown Audio)

An immersive, multigenerational and geographically diffuse novel can be a marvellous accompaniment to a spell away from normal life. Messud’s stimulating tale of the travails of a Franco-Algerian family from the beginning of the second world war to the recent past more than repays an investment of time and attention. There’s a terrific, steady calmness to Campbell’s narration.

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The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, read by George Weightman and Katie Leung (Sceptre)

A summer romance between two unlikely lovers is hardly unfamiliar fictional territory, but when the protagonists are a 19th-century polar explorer and a present-day civil servant who’s working on a governmental time-travel experiment, normal rules don’t apply. Bradley’s debut is thought-provoking fun, and makes for wrongfooting and lively listening.

A Lesson in Cruelty by Harriet Tyce, read by Candida Gubbins (Wildfire)

I always need at least one thriller per holiday, and an excellent candidate for this year’s is this chilling, multi-narrated story of incarceration, justice and retribution. Revolving around a charismatic academic and his startling theories of rehabilitation, this is a suspense novel with real philosophical heft, and the audio version moves in lively fashion between its very different protagonists.

The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne, read by the author (WF Howes)

When your aunt is Joan Didion and your father an acclaimed journalist, family anecdotes are likely to be eventful and starry, and the actor’s accounts of parties attended by Truman Capote and Natalie Wood duly oblige. But Dunne’s life changed irrevocably when his sister Dominique was brutally murdered, and this darkness too makes its way into his impeccably narrated book.

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