Authors are often the natural choice for narrating their own memoirs; their personal connection and the intimacy of the listening experience make up for any lack of professional polish. But what about authors performing fiction or narrative nonfiction? Writing and narrating are two very different skills, after all—but some authors successfully bridge the gap, leveraging their understanding of their characters and material to create a winning audiobook.
Jon Lindstrom is a professional narrator, and he has performed audiobooks by Alex Finlay, Blake Crouch, Riley Sager, and more. But, as our review of Hollywood Payback (Spotify Audiobooks, April 14) notes, “with this, his second novel after Hollywood Hustle (2024), he proves he can write them as well as he can perform them.” Lindstrom effortlessly gets into his protagonist’s head in this noir thriller, in which an ex-actor recently released from prison must figure out who’s trying to frame him for murder.
Eddie Huang has narrated two memoirs, Fresh Off the Boat (2013) and Double Cup Love (2016), and in his first novel, Come Undone (Random House Audio, June 16), he dives into the fictional life of 38-year-old Hubie Chang, a television star looking for intimacy and meaning in his life. According to our review, “His performance feels honest and uncompromising; rather than encouraging listeners to empathize with Hubie on any superficial level, Huang’s narration presents Hubie as a fully formed person, deepening listeners’ connection to this complicated character.”
Ruth Ozeki is another author who has experience narrating her own work, including A Tale for the Time Being (2013), which garnered an Earphones Award. Jeff Ebner, George Newbern, and Akie Kotabe all narrate stories in her new collection, The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions (Penguin Audio, June 2), but Ozeki narrates the majority of them herself, and our review points to her “relaxed pace, with varying tonal touches, from placid to biting, tailored to the content of each story.”
As Patrick Radden Keefe investigates the apparent suicide of 19-year-old Zac Brettler in London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth (Random House Audio, April 7), our review calls out his compassion as key to the audiobook performance: “His tone has a comforting intimacy that helps listeners understand how he convinced Brettler’s grieving parents, who were driven by heartache and the inaction of London police, to give him years of interviews.”
Audible empathy also enhances the listening experience in Louise Brangan’s history, The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence (Simon & Schuster Audio, May 5), which follows the experiences of several women. As our review notes, “Her tone becomes subtly harsher when recounting the stories of those who looked the other way while the Church continued to imprison women and girls in plain sight.”
And narrating Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War (Tantor Media, July 7), her history of Paris’ luxurious Hotel Lutetia before and during the WWII German occupation, author Jane Rogoyska is “as assured, as nuanced, and as captivating as any seasoned professional,” according to our review. Her commanding voice is “perfectly attuned to her narrative,” enhancing an already engrossing historical reconstruction.
Jennifer Dowell is the audiobooks editor.
