Good To Hear: Audio Reviews of Inside The O’Briens, The Well, Ask The Past & Disclaimer

GoodTo Hear

At Readerly, we love to listen to books while we commute, clean, run, garden, and generally live our lives. As the weather gets warmer and the days get longer we find more time to listen, but that means we need to get more audiobooks in our queue. If you, like us, are always looking for your next great listen, here are a few titles to get you started.

Inside the O'Briens by Lisa GenovaInside the O’Briens by Lisa Genova, narrated by Skipp Sudduth (Simon & Schuster Audio) Everyone knows that Joe O’Brien’s mother drank herself to death, it is accepted neighborhood lore. When Joe starts exhibiting similar symptoms – involuntary movements, outbursts of temper – similar rumors begin to circulate about him. Except that Joe knows that he does not have a problem with alcohol. After visits to a couple of different doctors, Joe has an answer that explains not only his problems, but the ones that his mother had as well: Huntington’s disease. Genova builds the tension in Inside the O’Briens beautifully and establishes terribly high stakes while Sudduth so convincingly becomes Joe that the listener cannot help but be incredibly invested not only in Joe’s life, but in what his disease means for his family, and especially his children who each have a 50/50 chance of having inherited the gene themselves.

The Well by Catherine Chanter, narrated by Nicola Barber (Simon & Schuster Audio)The Well by Catherine Chanter It should have been a bad time to move from the city to a farm, what with the persistent drought throughout not only the UK but all of Europe. But Ruth and her husband Mark are plagued by rumors and bad memories, and they are assured that the farm they are buying has a persistent water table. It is more than that at The Well, though. Here there is rain, crops grow prolifically. It doesn’t take long before their neighbors begin to resent them and their land becomes a magnet for the desperate. Nicola Barber’s narration is enchanting, spinning Chanter’s tale into a web which ensnares listeners quickly into Ruth’s life and the dramatic events caused by the catastrophic drought.

Ask the Past by Elizabeth P. ArchibaldAsk the Past: Pertinent and Impertinent Advice From Yesteryear by Elizabeth P. Archibald, narrated by Graeme Malcom and Elizabeth P. Archibald (Hachette Audio) There is some advice that has stood the test of time and some advice that has, well, not. With Ask the Past, Archibald specializes in the latter. After finding some very entertaining advice about all manner of things in what basically amount to antique self-help books, historian Elizabeth P. Archibald began collecting them first for a blog, then for a book. Although you may not want to simply listen to Ask the Past straight through, the often bizarre advice is a great deal of fun while you are waiting in line, running a quick errand, or simply need a short palate cleanser between audiobooks.

Disclaimer by Renee KnightDisclaimer by Renee Knight, narrated by Michael Pennington and Laura Paton (HarperAudio) We’ve already recommended Disclaimer to you in print, plus it is the sort of story about which you don’t want to know too much ahead of time, so we’ll just skip ahead here specifically to the audiobook. Pennington and Paton escalate the intensity of their narration in a way that perfectly mirrors the ever-heightening intensity of the story itself. The result is an absolutely all-consuming listen.

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