The Best Audiobooks of 2024

From vertiginous, ensemble-cast excursions through the dark web and French Polynesia to searing inner monologues of the antebellum South, the Brooklyn rave scene and American music royalty: The year’s best audiobooks are exceptional not just for their writing, but for the vocal performances that make these narratives particularly absorbing in your ear.

James

By Percival Everett; read by Dominic Hoffman

Several times throughout this retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the titular enslaved man (Twain’s Jim), a white character notices James’s standard English cadence with shock and asks: “Why are you talking like that?” With impressive comedic timing and vocal agility, Hoffman skips nimbly between James’s natural eloquence and the “slave filter” he uses to hide it from white people, deepening a project that hinges on vernacular as both signifier and tool of liberation.

All Fours

By Miranda July; read by the author

A 45-year-old “workaholic” with a husband, child and an unspecified “creative” career embarks on a solo cross-country road trip but never makes it more than half an hour from home, thanks to a sexy young Hertz employee who washes her car windows and is apparently worth sacrificing not just a vacation but an entire life. July, a multi-hyphenate fiction writer, filmmaker, actor and artist whose “minor celebrity” seems comparable to her protagonist’s, reads her feverish and hedonistic new novel in what feels like one breath, her raspy monotone barreling through a motel-room affair, flashbacks of her child’s near-fatal birth and existential negotiations with her evolving sexuality, motherhood, perimenopause and mortality.