The Most Anticipated Audiobooks of March
AudioFile Presents the Month to Come in Literary Listening
Each month, our friends at AudioFile Magazine share a curated list of the best audiobooks for your literary listening pleasure.
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MARCH FICTION
Isaac’s Song by Daniel Black| Read by JD Jackson
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Harlequin Audio | 8.5 hrs.]
Narrator JD Jackson delivers a stirring performance of this cathartic companion to Daniel Black’s Don’t Cry for Me. Isaac, a young, queer Black man, undertakes therapy for help processing his emotions following the death of his father. His therapist encourages him to write down his life story to help him unpack its difficult circumstances.
Jackson’s lively pace and emotive deep voice capture the vulnerability in Isaac’s struggles with forgiveness and self-acceptance.
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz| Read by Alexander Skarsgard
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Penguin Audio | 10.5 hrs.]
Narrator Alexander Skarsgard provides the ideal voice for this audiobook. Just as one settles in with what seems like a typical Western, something occurs that reveals there’s nothing typical about it. Hakan, a reserved Swede of intimidating size, must navigate a strange country where dangers abound.
Skarsgard’s gentle tone suggests an innocence glowing halo-like over Hakan. Not for the faint of heart, this story will awaken an appreciation for the better aspects of human nature.
Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray| Read by Robin Miles
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Penguin Audio | 15 hrs.]
Narrator Robin Miles doesn’t miss a nuance in this passionate fictionalization of literary editor Jessie Redmon Fauset’s life. Fauset’s unprecedented work finding and first publishing soon-to-be literary giants such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, giving birth to the Harlem Renaissance, is a little-known story deserving attention.
Miles is so convincing that listeners will deeply feel Jessie’s pain, elation, and strength of purpose.
A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker: 1925-2025 by Deborah Treisman [Ed.], New Yorker Magazine Inc.| Read by Deborah Treisman, Rob Shapiro, Richard Brewer, Rebecca Lowman, Rachel Jacobs, Kirby Heyborne, Cassandra Campbell, André Santana, et al
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Random House Audio | 46.5 hrs.]
This centennial collection of New Yorker stories will undoubtedly lead this year’s lists of prestigious audiobooks—and deservedly so. With a roster of enduring authors and stories and a cast expertly matched to the voice and character of each story, this is an unparalleled listening experience, and a hallmark of good casting and production values.
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor| Read by Liz Femi, Anthony Oseyemi, Jason Culp, Chris Djuma
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Harper Audio | 16.25 hrs.]
Liz Femi is the primary narrator of this meta-narrative about a paraplegic Nigerian American woman and her unexpected rise to fame. Suddenly unemployed, Zelu risks writing a novel unlike any she’s ever written before, a futuristic sci-fi epic about androids who exist after humanity becomes extinct.
Femi’s distinct voices complement each character’s personality, thoroughly enriching this audiobook.
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MARCH NONFICTION
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver| Read by Kimberly Farr
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Penguin Audio | 6.5 hrs.]
Many of Mary Oliver’s poems are about God or nature, and sometimes it’s difficult to find the line between them. Her world was full of many delights and, had she lived to hear them, Kimberly Farr’s interpretations of her poems would have been among them.
Oliver chose these poems as her best, and here we can hear them as their best selves.
Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism by Eve L. Ewing| Read by Robin Miles, Eve L. Ewing
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Random House Audio | 12.25 hrs.]
Golden Voice narrator Robin Miles is a gifted performer whose tone, tempo, and cadence enhance the dark truths of this provocative work on the failure of our educational system. Ewing, who is a scholar and poet, indicts American schools as historically rigged against Black and Native American students.
She defines in well-supported detail the pillars of racism that have tainted attitudes towards both groups.
Food for Thought: Essays and Ruminations by Alton Brown| Read by Alton Brown
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Simon & Schuster Audio | 7 hrs.]
Add “outstanding audiobook narrator” to Brown’s impressive resumé. He is, after all, a Food Network personality, a cookbook author, and an avid food science researcher, and it’s no surprise that he performs his “essays and ruminations” smoothly and wittily.
His range of interests is expansive, but it’s his funny and quirky opinions that stay with the listener.
Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, Danez Smith [Ed.]| Read by Danez Smith
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Hachette Audio | 1.5 hrs.]
A poet, performance artist, and devotee of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes presents a selection of Hughes’s early poems, songs, and other writings, created from 1921 to 1927. Danez Smith is extraordinary at performing their stirring introduction to Hughes’s early creative output.
With their clear baritone voice and extraordinary vocal talent, Smith’s performance is beautiful to hear and unfailingly connected to the core messages within these poems, journal entries, and other works.
Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses (Embers, Book 1) by M.G. Sheftall| Read by Brian Nishii
AudioFile Earphones Award
[Penguin Audio | 17 hrs.]
Brian Nishii, who was born and raised in Tokyo, is the perfect voice to narrate these eyewitness accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima. This volume is the first of a two-volume series on the atomic bombings of August 1945.
Drawing on extensive interviews with those who survived, author Sheftall gives great detail on the day-to-day lives of the Japanese homefront and also provides details on Americans involved—from the crew of the bombers to those who developed the bomb.
