My favorite audiobooks of 2025

Here One Moment

by Liane Moriarty

This has a big premise: on a delayed flight from Hobart to Sydney, an older lady walks the aisle and tells every single passenger their age and cause of death. After the flight, some try to laugh it off but many are deeply disturbed by the woman's predictions and seriously rethink how to live their lives in the months following the flight. This multi-voiced novel tells the story of the psychic as well as many of the people whose lives were impacted by her predictions. As so often happens with Liane Moriarty novels, I didn't want to put this down—and then I found myself pondering the book's themes of probability, agency, and love long after I finished listening. This was great on audio, as narrated by Caroline Lee and Geraldine Hakewill.

The History of Sound: Stories

by Ben Shattuck

While reading this tightly interconnected collection of short stories ranging from 1700s Nantucket to present day New England, I gasped each time I experienced a new way Shattuck played one off another. Shattuck explains in the epigraph that the dozen stories are styled as a “hook-and-chain” poem: they are presented as pairs, with the second story providing a new perspective or fresh insight on what was shared in the first. The first and last stories serve as corresponding bookends, with the bracketed ten stories also divided into complementary pairings. This is the best short story collection I've read in ages and I suspect it could happily stand up to multiple rereadings. I’m so glad I read it via audiobook thanks to the full cast, which included Ed Helms, Paul Mescal, Jenny Slate, and Nick Offerman reading me stories.

Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

by Sarah Polley

Actor and director Sarah Polley’s memoir-in-essays knocked my socks off. It’s a clear-eyed examination of painful memories from her personal life and decades-long career, ranging from scoliosis to high-risk pregnancy to sexual assault. The title comes courtesy of a concussion specialist who treated Polley and advised her on how to rewire and ultimately heal the pathways in her brain by confronting whatever caused her discomfort. That same approach is used skillfully in each essay. The audiobook as narrated by the author was the right book at the right time for me.

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

by Garrett M. Graff

I've heard raves about Graff's 9/11 oral history since it was published in 2019, but the truth is, I was scared of it. I was flying from Europe to New York on 9/11, and knew these pages contained both the details of what I already knew and plenty I didn't yet know. But this book reemerged on my radar and for reasons I cannot articulate, I felt like it was time. This is an oral history of 9/11, beginning with observations about the "severe clear" of the September blue sky and ending in the weeks following the attacks. Graff and his team conducted more than 500 interviews for this project, and they've been assembled to narrate the events of that day across the United States and especially at the attack sites as it was experienced in real time. This was not an easy read, but I'm so glad I finally read it. Breathtaking, important, sobering, profound—all the superlatives apply.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

by Robert A. Caro

If every reader holds a fascination for an unlikely subject, mine is urban planning—which is why the recommendations I've received to read The Power Broker over the years are legion. I finally picked it up and slowly made my way through its 1344 pages, which have frequently been described as a tour de force of biography, history, and journalism. In these pages I learned how I had no idea what I didn't know, and that my own experience moving through New York City, the United States, and even some cities of the world had been decidedly impacted by this man who never held elected office and yet built more infrastructure and structures than anyone who's ever lived—and influenced the building of many more. I'm so glad I finally read this: I was expecting something akin to Witold Rybczynski's A Clearing in the Distance about Frederick Law Olmsted and the building of America (and NYC parks) in the 19th Century, and was surprised to discover it felt much more like Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, a Lincoln biography that lingers on the question of how history would be different both then and today had Lincoln survived to lead his country through the Reconstruction era. Here Caro poses an inversion of that question, asking how New York City might be better—that is, more equitable, accessible, and beautiful—had Moses not held the power to shape the landscape and infrastructure from the crucial years of 1924 to 1968 in ways that today are irreversible.

Next Time Will Be Our Turn

by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Sutanto demonstrates her range in this new bittersweet love story that feels very different in tone and structure from her previous works—more wistful, vastly less zany, and unfolding as a long conversation between a grandmother and her teenage granddaughter. The story begins at a fancy family dinner: teenage Izzy has always felt out of place in her highly traditional Indonesian family of origin—but then her beloved grandmother shocks them all when she walks in with a woman on her arm, and stuns Izzy with an astonishing story about the love of her life. I was hanging on every word of the narrative—and was also struck by the tender and real intergenerational dynamics. I especially loved looking over Izzy's shoulder as she slowly took in the love and loss her grandmother experienced long before Izzy entered the picture. This was wonderful on audio, as narrated by Louisa Zhu and fan favorite Emily Woo Zeller.

Grown Women

by Sarai Johnson

I'm so happy I stumbled upon this 2024 debut while browsing because I ate it up! This multigenerational family saga begins when a cash-strapped and very pregnant young woman named Charlotte lands in Nashville to start a new life with the soon-to-arrive daughter she does not want to have. No plot summary can do this justice, but I loved it for its realistic and emotionally resonant exploration of race, class, ambivalent parenthood, resentment, tragedy, and redemption through four generations of a Black southern family. This was excellent on audio, as narrated by Karen Chilton, but I switched to print at the end so I could find out what happened faster.

My favorite audiobooks of 2025

Here One Moment

The History of Sound: Stories

Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Next Time Will Be Our Turn

Grown Women

a gateway

to reliable joy this summer

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summer reading starts May 16th