The Best Books of the 21st Century, from the New York Times

My Brilliant Friend

The Neapolitan Novels: Book #1

By: Elena Ferrante
Narrated by: Hillary Huber
Length: 12 hours 37 minutes

“Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels are a fierce, intimate, and beautifully unflinching account of female friendship - believe the hype - -a fever dream that leaves you impossibly clear-headed. Read more

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

By: Isabel Wilkerson
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 22 hours 40 minutes

“I'm sorry I hadn't gotten to this sooner. Wilkerson pulls together so much of what I already knew about the US but not necessarily why... a great audiobook, too. Read more

Wolf Hall

A Novel

Wolf Hall Trilogy: Book #1

By: Hilary Mantel
Narrated by: Ben Miles
Length: 25 hours 12 minutes

This program is read by Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

“[Ben] Miles’ charming, yet dastardly narration makes Cromwell an anti-hero worth rooting for no matter how hard you try not to.”—TIME on Wolf Hall

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK... Read more

The Known World

By: Edward P. Jones
Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
Length: 14 hours 17 minutes

In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his... Read more

The Corrections

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

By: Jonathan Franzen
Narrated by: Kelly Burke, Colin Stinton, Richard Schiff, Full Cast, Sam Dale, Maggie Steed, Julian Rhind-Tutt & Roslyn Hill
Length: 3 hours 25 minutes

In 2006, Bret Easton Ellis declared the novel "one of the three great books of my generation."

This dramatisation of Jonathan Franzen's acclaimed, epic, award-winning novel revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to "one last Christmas" together... Read more

The Corrections

A Novel

By: Jonathan Franzen
Narrated by: George Guidall
Length: 21 hours 53 minutes

The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long... Read more

2666

By: Roberto Bolaño
Narrated by: Pedro Sánchez, Gerardo Prat, Humberto Amor, Roberto Medina & Alejandro Vargas-Lugo
Length: 45 hours 38 minutes

Imprescindible. Apocalíptica. Única. La novela que abrió el camino a seguir por la narrativa del siglo XXI. Escucha ahora el mejor libro en español de los últimos 25 años según Babelia. La ciudad mexicana de Santa Teresa -trasunto de Ciudad Juárez- atrae como un imán a los protagonistas. Cuatro críticos literarios europeos viajan hasta Sonora... Read more

2666

A Novel

By: Roberto Bolaño
Narrated by: various narrators, John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, Scott Brick & Grover Gardner
Length: 39 hours 15 minutes

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his most brilliant achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strange beauty, daring experimentation, and epic scope. The book’s subject matter ranges from the heady heights of literature and love to the gritty realism of violence... Read more

The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in)

A Novel

By: Colson Whitehead
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 10 hours 43 minutes

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century

The basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series... Read more

Austerlitz

By: W.G. Sebald
Narrated by: Richard Matthews
Length: 7 hours 9 minutes

W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle.

“Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and... Read more

Never Let Me Go

By: Kazuo Ishiguro
Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
Length: 9 hours 40 minutes

“Ishiguro is a master at transporting readers viscerally into his settings, and this book is no exception. It's dreary and haunting, brooding and intimate, and the nonchalance with which he presents the biggest twist of the novel can be quite jarring on your first read. Read more

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

By: Junot Díaz
Narrated by: Lin-Manuel Miranda & Karen Olivo
Length: 9 hours 52 minutes

Read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award®-winning creator and star of the musical Hamilton, and Tony Award®-winning actress, Karen Olivo. This brilliant narration adds another layer of lyricism and depth to this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic novel.


Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican... Read more

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

By: Junot Díaz
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
Length: 15 hours 58 minutes

“This is one of my all-time favorite novels; I even wrote a chapter of my dissertation on it! Read more

The Year of Magical Thinking

By: Joan Didion
Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
Length: 5 hours 10 minutes

Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack.



This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had... Read more

The Road

By: Cormac McCarthy
Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
Length: 6 hours 41 minutes

“I had only ever read this in print before. The language is sparse and evocative and Tom Stechschulte's narration was spot on. Glad to be reminded how magnificent this book is. Read more

Outline

The Outline Trilogy: Book #1

By: Rachel Cusk
Narrated by: Kate Lock
Length: 7 hours 17 minutes

A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language.A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking—about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is... Read more

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

By: Michael Chabon
Narrated by: David Colacci
Length: 26 hours 20 minutes

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEThe beloved, award-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a Michael Chabon masterwork, is the American epic of two boy geniuses named Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay. Now with special bonus material by Michael Chabon.A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus”... Read more

Lincoln in the Bardo

A Novel

By: George Saunders
Narrated by: George Saunders, Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Carrie Brownstein, Don Cheadle, Lena Dunham, Bill Hader, Kirby Heyborne, Keegan-Michael Key, Julianne Moore, Megan Mullally, Susan Sarandon, Ben Stiller & Various
Length: 7 hours 24 minutes

“This was my first audiobook and i've been devoted to them ever since. This novel was one-of-a-kind to begin with, so it's no wonder it took a cast of over one hundred actors to realize it in audio. I will admit, at first I found the citations jarring - yes, real and fictional historical sources presented mid-narrative - but by the end they were... Read more

Say Nothing

A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

By: Patrick Radden Keefe
Narrated by: Matthew Blaney
Length: 14 hours 40 minutes

“This book is as good as everyone says. I knew I didn't know a ton about the troubles in Northern Ireland, but I didn't know HOW much I didn't know. This book turns a rather complex, sometimes dry (if you're not Irish or a war history person) subject into a story of intrigue, weaving the conflict's history with the stories of a few men and women... Read more

Erasure

A Novel

By: Percival Everett
Narrated by: Sean Crisden
Length: 8 hours 16 minutes

“The novel on which the film American Fiction is based: Percival Everett’s caustic, funny and thought-provoking novel about race, stereotypes, and the publishing industry. Read more