In the past few years, the majority of my reading has shifted to audiobooks. While I still read about two books per month in print, audiobooks now occupy the prime spot in my reading life. Just this year, 20 of the 27 books I’ve read so far have been in audio format. With so many books read on audio, the narrator is so important. I’ve spoken about my perennial favorites some in previous posts, but I thought I’d highlight a few new favorites here. These are narrators I’ve discovered more recently whose name in an audiobook credit makes me more likely to check out that book in the first place.

 

Imogen Church

Ruth Ware is one of my favorite new authors of recent years, and I’ve read all four of her books on audio. Imogen Church narrates all of them, and her voice has come to define Ware’s complicated, human characters and her moody, murderous settings. Church’s voice is ever-so-slightly deeper than the average woman’s voice, and she paces her narration well, both aspects which heighten the tension and add to the atmospheric feel of these fantastic mysteries.

 

Robert Glenister

Sometimes when I listen to an audiobook, I just want a deep, commanding, British accent to narrate the story. Robert Glenister has the voice for the job. He narrates the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith/J.K. Rowling, and he does a fantastic job. He voices male characters perfectly, is better than average with female characters, and makes even the most tedious parts of the books (and there are a few, as Rowling can get a bit too wordy and bogged down in the details sometimes) immersive.

 

Stephanie Hsu

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan was one of my favorite books of 2018, and that’s largely thanks to Stephanie Hsu, who narrates the audiobook. Unlike some other narrators of YA, she doesn’t make the main character’s voice seem artificially young. Instead, her voice sounds realistically like a teenager’s, which aren’t necessarily higher-pitched than that of other women who may be in their 20s or 30s. Making an adult narrator’s voice sound like it belongs to a teen has something to do with pitch, but in my experience as a listener, it has more to do with cadence and tone. And of course, Pan’s superb writing helps significantly.

 

Hillary Huber

Huber is quickly becoming one of my go-to narrators for adult fiction. She narrated two literary scifi books I really enjoyed, Good Morning Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton and The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones, and in each case, her narration was clear, careful, and paced perfectly. She has the kind of voice that sounds full and feels full of meaning when she narrates, much like that of Kirsten Potter (one of those perennial favorites I alluded to in my intro).

 

Michael Kramer

Kramer narrated the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, which I somehow missed as an avid adult fantasy reader in my early 20s and have only finally gotten around to reading now. Kramer’s work definitely added to my enjoyment of the doorstopper books, whose page counts and tiny print can be intimidating. He does well voicing all characters, though he’s best at male characters (his female character voicing sounds a bit too breathy/soft for my liking, a common flaw in male-voiced audiobooks). He’s particularly good at voicing slight accents for characters of different races or regions of Sanderson’s world so that it’s immediately obvious who is speaking, no dialogue tag required.

 

Bahni Turpin

The YA world has loved Bahni Turpin for a while, but I’ve only recently listened to some of her work. She does a fantastic job in Children of Blood and Bone as primary narrator and is by far the standout narrator in Ellen Goodlett’s Rule, which is told in three different perspectives by three different narrators. I also appreciated her work in Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation. Turpin is great at imbuing emotion into every word without her voice coming across as exaggerated, which I feel is a common flaw in narration for children’s audiobooks. Her speaking voice is also unique; I’d be able to pick it out from a big group of other voices and name hers immediately.