Percival Everett’s reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has already been praised as one of the best novels of 2024, and it won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction last month. That it’s one of the best audiobooks of the year should come as no surprise, either.
Like Mark Twain’s classic, James (Random House Audio, 7 hours and 49 minutes) is driven by a strong voice, the sheer force of its narrator propelling the action, in which a runaway boy and a runaway enslaved man embark on adventures along the Mississippi River. Dominic Hoffman, who you may recognize from the audio versions of James McBride’s Deacon King Kong and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, embodies the depth and intelligence of Everett’s protagonist. Told from his thoughtful perspective, the story takes on a new and intriguing light and is all the more compelling for it.
One of Everett’s recurring themes concerns the power of language—how it can be deployed as a weapon or a shield, a survival strategy or an act of trust. James and other enslaved people speak one placating dialect to whites and a more elegant language with each other, a distinction that Hoffman’s deft performance underscores and elevates.
Narrator Shayna Small reads most of Essie Chambers’ Swift River (Simon & Schuster, 10 hours and 17 minutes), a story of identity, family, and racism in the 1980s that recently won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. Diamond, an overweight biracial teen whose father vanished when she was a child, feels both isolated and uncomfortably conspicuous in her all-white New England town. When her mother decides to have her father declared legally dead, one of his relatives reaches out to Diamond, who begins to learn the truth about the Black family she’s never met.
Janina Edwards and Robin Miles voice the family members guiding Diamond to a new understanding of herself and her past. Small, however, carries the production, reflecting Diamond’s youthful angst and frustration with her mother, whose cloying, clingy warbling grates on the listener in precisely the same way it frustrates her daughter. This clever trick may seem annoying at first, but the listener’s cringes and impatience mimic Diamond’s own reactions, investing them firmly in her future.
Irish author Kevin Barry ’s ribald Western The Heart in Winter (Random House Audio, 5 hours and 54 minutes), his first novel set in America, begins in the debauched mining town of Butte, Montana in 1891. An opium-fogged poet and the new bride of the pit boss fall in love and run away together, desperate to outrun fate and a gun-brandishing posse to start over in San Francisco. Barry, who reads the book himself, delivers a dazzling, awardworthy performance, alternately funny and fierce, his pitch-perfect narration revealing the story’s profane beauty, sharp humor, and profound tragicomedy.
Actor Éanna Hardwicke—from the TV series based on Sally Rooney’s Normal People—reads the author’s Intermezzo (Macmillan Audio, 16 hours and 29 minutes), in which two Irish brothers—one a lawyer, the other a competitive chess player—come to terms with their father’s death and their own messy romantic lives. Though it blossoms into a remarkable character study, the novel starts slowly. But Hardwicke’s steady, nuanced performance is enticing, demanding patience as Rooney expertly fleshes out her complicated brothers to examine the universal conflict between society’s expectations and our own fragile hopes and desires.
Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida.
