AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of June

Each month, our friends at AudioFile Magazine share a curated list of the best audiobooks for your literary listening pleasure.

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JUNE FICTION

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty| Read by Darrell Dennis
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Recorded Books | 6.5 hrs.]

Darrell Dennis navigates this touching novel about a family in distress; it’s a gritty story about addiction, dementia, and obligations. Charles Lamosway is a white man raised on Maine’s Penobscot reservation—an outsider. With the empathy created by Dennis, listeners will root for Charles as he deals with losing his mother and trying to connect with an estranged daughter.

Talty’s debut novel is a virtuoso story of blood, heritage, beliefs, and the legacy of how we are indebted to others. Dennis’s youthful tone and empathy for these troubled characters make this listen triumphant and bittersweet.

One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon| Read by Nicole Lewis
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Random House Audio | 8.5 hrs.]

In an engrossing, well-characterized performance, Nicole Lewis captures the anguish and suspense in acclaimed YA author Nicola Yoon’s first adult novel. Moving to the fictional gated community of Liberty, California, hailed as a Black utopia, Jasmyn Williams assumes she and her husband will find like-minded friends concerned with racial equality and justice.

But something is strangely off in Liberty. Lewis is masterful at subtly distinguishing the voices of Liberty, using cadence, intonation, and vocal amplification to heighten the tension of this absorbing psychological suspense.

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy| Read by Simone Collins
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Simon & Schuster Audio | 6.25 hrs.]

This novel, short-listed for the Woman’s Book Prize, details a young mother’s fatigue, frustrations, and joys at raising a trying infant who becomes a willful toddler. Simone Collins’s narration benefits from her intimate and persuasive tone, as well as the lovely lilt of her Irish accent. Her performance resonates as her tone, pace, and intonation reveal the struggling mom’s love.

This brief, powerful depiction of motherhood rings true and creates an immersive listening experience.

The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton| Read by Vico Ortiz
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Harper Audio | 11.5 hrs.]

Vico Ortiz narrates a raucous space adventure rom-com with infectious energy. It’s 2061, and Cleo and her three best friends sneak aboard to explore a rocket abandoned twenty years ago when its two-hundred-and-three-person crew disappeared. But then they’re accidentally launched into space with only Billie, the prickly holographic computer, to guide them.

Ortiz’s considerable acting talents bring each character—human and otherwise—to life, and they especially shine in scenes packed with banter. This lively story of friendship and queer romance is full of interdimensional danger and is heaps of fun on audio.

Farewell, Amethystine: Easy Rawlins, Book 16 by Walter Mosley| Read by Michael Boatman
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Hachette Audio | 9 hrs.]

With his amazing portfolio of voices, Michael Boatman draws listeners into PI Easy Rawlins’s world in 1970s Los Angeles. Mosley’s writing paired with Boatman’s narration once again delivers a sociological tableau that keeps listeners engaged throughout. Rawlins’ attempts to find a missing person open a Pandora’s box of corruption in the LAPD, and listeners get a window onto Easy’s backstory.

Boatman skillfully portrays a myriad of characters, smoothly distinguishing genders, ages, and backgrounds and creating the illusion of a full-cast performance.

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JUNE NONFICTION

Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel by Pamela Mulloy| Read by Jennifer Wigmore
AudioFile Earphones Award
[ECW Press | 6 hrs.]

Canadian actor Jennifer Wigmore has a lovely narrating voice and a pleasing tone. Her cadence is just right for an audiobook that explores the history and meaning of train travel. She narrates in an informational yet personal style that fits this immersive and deeply researched meditation on the delights of watching the landscape flash by while reading, writing, or daydreaming in the cocoon of a rail car.

Written partly during the pandemic, this audiobook offers quiet lucidity.

The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne| Read by Griffin Dunne
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Penguin Audio | 12.25 hrs.]

Griffin Dunne’s narration of his memoir pairs a tender conversational tone with occasional moments of drama that embrace his gifts as a writer and actor, as well as the cast of vivid characters he portrays. Dunne augments his rich material with intonations, pacing, and tension that fully engage.

Whether he’s telling stories of privileged Hollywood familiars, political well-knowns, family members, or famed relatives, each vignette commands attention for its narrative worth, rather than the celebrity mentions. Dunne’s acting chops, writing instincts, and raconteur heritage are always evident.

The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stefanos Geroulanos| Read by Elizabeth Wiley
AudioFile Earphones Award
[HighBridge Audio | 14.75 hrs.]

Narrator Elizabeth Wiley is a gifted enunciator, adept at delivering the full weight and value of every word. For this expansive survey of how theories of prehistory have shaped thinking and events over the past three centuries, she maintains a steady pace and a level tone. Wiley proves the ideal complement to historian Stefanos Geroulanos’s provocative and incisive review of humankind’s origin story, and our current knowledge of prehistory.

Deeply satisfying and highly stimulating on a single listen, this thought-provoking narrative rewards repeated listening.

All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words: Unpublished, Unvarnished, and Told by The Beatles and Their Inner Circle by Peter Brown, Steven Gaines| Read by Adam Stevens, Anthony Howell, Ben Jacobson, Emma Gregory, Todd Kramer, Philip Stewart, Robert G. Slade, ShinFei Chen, Stefan Menaul, Mickey Knighton
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Macmillan Audio | 11.25 hrs.]

You think you know the Beatles story? When you hear this audiobook and the performances of Adam Stevens, Anthony Howell, Emma Gregory, and others, you’ll be singing, “I thought I knew you, what did I know?” Based on interviews with the Beatles and their intimate associates in 1980 and 1981, the audiobook is nearly 10 hours of history, often shocking.

This is one of those audiobooks you can’t shut off and will never forget.

The Birds that Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness by Kenn Kaufman| Read by Mack Sanderson
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Simon & Schuster Audio | 12 hrs.]

Narrator Mack Sanderson balances several storylines in this jaw-dropping history of the race to identify native birds in early 1800s America. Patiently mounting the evidence, Kaufman recounts, or rather dismantles, the career of John James Audubon, who it seems stole, fudged, misidentified, and miscategorized many of his discoveries, along with shooting birds, owning and selling slaves, and pirating nearly everyone in his highly competitive field.

Seamlessly, Sanderson weaves this crowded narrative into a history of species categorization and naming. Sanderson’s smooth, mellow tones glide easily over the narrative’s sprawling landscape and highlight its many insights and surprises.