You may think you’re having a bad day, but it’s nothing compared to Mark Watney’s. As voiced by R.C. Bray, Watney, an acerbic, wisecracking astronaut, finds himself a modern-day Robinson Crusoe when he’s stranded on Mars. After seeing Watney get skewered by a communications antenna during a sandstorm, his crewmates on Ares 3 abort their mission and flee, figuring him dead. Now Watney has to find a way to stay alive until the next Ares mission comes along in three years. Bray’s conversational style animates the astronaut’s log entries as well as the multinational group of space agency staff and Ares 3 crew members working to rescue Watney. THE MARTIAN is a crackling, often humorous, listen. D.E.M. 2015 Audies Winner © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2013
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Eric Flint's series has been running for 12 years, and this is the book that started it all. A small mining town in West Virginia is teleported through time and space to Germany during the Thirty Years War, and its inhabitants must learn to survive in this brutal age. Narrator George Guidall brings a quiet gravitas to the often gory proceedings. He uses regional accents lightly, preferring to portray the characters through cadence and the solid pronunciation of difficult Germanic words and phrases. His best moments come in the many scenes of dialogue when the characters banter and shout. Guidall never lets the dialogue get ahead of him, reading deliberately to keep even the most emotional scenes on an even keel.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2012
Duration: 19 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781464018282
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Dick Hill is a talented narrator, beloved for his renditions of the classics and action novels by Lee Child and Michael Connelly. Hill has gravitas; the man knows how to impregnate a pause. Movies by Albert Brooks, such as LOST IN AMERICA and DEFENDING YOUR LIFE, show actors—himself prominent among them—in circumstances so humiliating that they’re hilarious. Having chosen a futuristic setting for his first-ever novel, Brooks has upped the ante. The future is where many of us—all those unsaved—expect the worst. The combination of Hill’s deep voice and Brooks’s dark comic vision pushes hard at the line between what’s funny and what’s only sad. But hang on, because there’s a happy ending, or happyish.
Pub Date: May 30, 2011
Duration: 14 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Tantor Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
