Summer is here. Whether you’re on a plane, in the car, on a beach, or optimistically sitting in a British garden waiting for the rain to stop, you’ll need audiobooks to keep yourself entertained!
We’ve picked twenty that are worth your holiday listening time. These are audiobooks we love, audiobooks our listeners love, and audiobooks that are making noise right now (ha – see what we did there?).
Non-Fiction Stranger Than Fiction
London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, read by the author
In 2019, a 19-year-old named Zac Brettler fell from the balcony of a luxury apartment on the Thames. His family, reeling from grief, began to discover that Zac had been living a secret life, posing as the heir to a Russian oligarch’s fortune and moving through London’s criminal underworld with a confidence that belied his age.
Patrick Radden Keefe, the author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, tells this story with the meticulous reporting and narrative grip you would expect. He narrates it himself, and the result is a book that reads like a thriller but is entirely, disturbingly true. It is a #1 New York Times bestseller and one of the most talked-about non-fiction audiobooks of the year.
The Book That Blew the Lid Off Big Tech
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, read by the author
A young New Zealand diplomat lands her dream job at Facebook, believing it can change the world. She rises to the top ranks and discovers that the decisions being made at the heart of one of the most powerful companies on the planet are not what she expected. This is the inside story of Facebook’s global influence, told by someone who was in the room.
Wynn-Williams narrates it herself, and the result is direct, compelling, and uncomfortable in all the right ways. It won the British Book Award for Best Audiobook: Non-Fiction in 2026, reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and is one of the most important tech books published in years.
The Book Everyone Will Have Read This Summer
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, read by Rebecca Lowman
A tradwife influencer wakes up in 1855 and discovers that the romanticised past she has been selling to millions of followers is nothing like the real thing. Caro Claire Burke’s debut is sharp, funny, and surprisingly moving, a novel that takes a very online premise and turns it into something much bigger about tradition, performance, and what we choose to believe about the past.
It is a #1 New York Times bestseller and a GMA Book Club pick. Rebecca Lowman’s narration is pitch-perfect. This is one of those audiobooks you will want to talk about as soon as you finish it.
The Women’s Prize Contender
The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson, read by the author
Shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Mercy Step is set in Bradford in December 1962. A precocious girl named Mercy enters a chaotic household where her siblings do not understand her, her mother’s attention belongs to the Church, and the family lives at the whims of her father’s quick temper. Left to herself, Mercy finds solace in books, her imagination, and the quiet comfort of her faithful toy, Dolly.
Hutchinson narrates her own novel, and it shows. This is a debut that earned its place on the Women’s Prize shortlist, and one of the most distinctive new voices in British fiction.
The Wickedly Smart Thriller
Honey by Imani Thompson, read by Chloe Sommer
Yrsa is a Black PhD student at Cambridge specialising in Afropessimism, increasingly frustrated by the gap between academic theory about liberation and what actually happens in the real world. When a close friend’s research is stolen by a predatory professor, Yrsa starts to wonder whether theoretical knowledge is enough. Then the professor dies after an allergic reaction to a bee, and Yrsa discovers she rather enjoyed it. What follows is dark, sharp, funny, and completely unputdownable.
Imani Thompson’s debut has been called a provocatively dark thriller that subverts the female serial killer trope with an academic lens. The writing is quick and sarcastic, and Chloe Sommer’s narration captures Yrsa perfectly: sometimes despicable, sometimes an absolute pleasure to spend time with.
The One That Will Break Your Heart
Half Lives by Krystle Zara Appiah, read by Yasmin Mwanza
In 1970s Ghana, sisters Evelyn and Maggie are two sides of the same coin. Reliable Evelyn supports her struggling family while Maggie skips class to flirt with boys. They have promised each other that one day they will escape to America together. Then Evelyn marries a wealthy surgeon and moves to New York. Maggie falls pregnant without a husband. And when a terrible accident causes Evelyn to lose her unborn child, she takes her sister’s unwanted baby to the States to raise as her own.
Krystle Zara Appiah is a British-Ghanaian writer whose debut, Rootless, won the NAACP Image Award. Half Lives has been compared to The Vanishing Half and Blue Sisters, and it earns the comparison. Yasmin Mwanza’s narration is beautiful. This is the kind of novel that stays with you long after you finish it.
The One With the Star-Studded Cast
It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell, read by Lesley Sharp, James Norton, and a full cast
Lisa Jewell is one of the best writers of psychological thrillers working today, and It Could Have Been Her is a showcase for everything she does well. Jane Trevally finds a small white terrier while walking her dogs on her country estate. When the teenager who was looking after the dog is reported missing, Jane returns the animal to its registered owner in London, arriving at a house called Thornwood where she has a dark history. Twenty-five years of buried secrets begin to surface.
The audiobook features Lesley Sharp and James Norton leading a full cast that also includes Joanna David, Emilia Fox, and Freddie Fox. There is a lot of buzz around this one, and the narration is outstanding.
The Darkly Funny Whodunit
Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth, read by Hannah Fredericksen and Jenny Seedsman
There are two kinds of people no one ever suspects of being murderers: little girls and old ladies. Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is eighty-one years old and has lived on Kenny Lane for sixty years, longer than anyone else. She is a curmudgeon who minds everyone else’s business. She also has a past she has worked hard to conceal, and a strange history of people in her life coming to unpleasant ends.
Sally Hepworth delivers a twist-filled, darkly funny mystery that won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year in 2026. Out 9th July, and exactly the kind of book you will devour in a single afternoon by the pool.
Sunshine in Your Ears
Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer, read by Edoardo Ballerini
Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer for Less, and Villa Coco is cut from the same cloth: warm, funny, and deceptively moving. A young archivist takes a job as assistant to Coco, a wealthy, formidable woman living in a crumbling Tuscan villa. He expects to catalogue her possessions. Instead, he gets swept up in eccentric guests, a brazen funeral heist, and Coco’s grand mission to reunite with the love of her life.
David Sedaris said no one writing in English is funnier or more charming than Andrew Greer. If you want an audiobook that feels like a long Italian lunch in the sun, this is it.
The Poolside Page-Turner
The Divorce by Freida McFadden, read by January LaVoy, Edoardo Ballerini, and Marin Ireland
Freida McFadden does one thing exceptionally well: she makes you think you know what is happening, and then she pulls the rug. The Divorce follows Naomi, whose husband throws her out, hires the city’s sharpest lawyers, empties their accounts, and replaces her with someone twenty years younger. She is supposed to accept it. She does not.
What starts as bitter curiosity hardens into obsession, and then into something darker. The full-cast narration from LaVoy, Ballerini, and Ireland is superb. It is one of the best thriller audiobooks of 2026 and exactly what you want by the pool.
A Slow Burn for a Long Weekend
Land by Maggie O’Farrell, read by Dane Whyte O’Hara
Maggie O’Farrell follows Hamnet with a sweeping novel set in 1865 Ireland, in the lingering shadow of the Great Hunger. O’Farrell does what she always does: she takes a historical setting and fills it with people so vivid you forget you are reading about the past.
This is a slower burn than some of the others on this list, and that is the point. It is the audiobook equivalent of a novel you read over a long weekend in the countryside. Immersive, beautiful, and hard to let go of when it is over.
A Novel Told Entirely in Letters
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, read by a full cast
A Women’s Prize for Fiction winner, The Correspondent unfolds through letters written to Sybil Van Antwerp by the people in her life. It is an inventive, layered novel that reveals its story piece by piece, with each correspondent adding a new angle, a new secret, a new version of the truth.
The full-cast audiobook features Maggi-Meg Reed, Jane Oppenheimer, David Pittu, and over a dozen other narrators. Every voice is a different character, and the effect is like eavesdropping on an entire world. It is one of the most creative audiobook productions of the year.
High-Octane and Unputdownable
The Kingpin by A.A. Dhand, read by Adonis Siddique
If you missed The Chemist, go back and listen to that first, then come straight here. A.A. Dhand’s sequel picks up with pharmacist Idris Khan, a pillar of his Leeds community, whose estranged brother Zidane turns up fresh out of prison. Zidane’s presence is radioactive, and Idris is pulled back into a world he thought he had left behind.
Dhand writes fast-paced, adrenaline-fuelled thrillers rooted in the reality of northern England. Adonis Siddique’s narration is perfectly matched to the material. This is a proper page-turner that never lets up.
A Classic, Reimagined
Havisham by Elle Machray, read by Alby Baldwin
What if Miss Havisham’s story did not begin and end within Satis House? Elle Machray takes Dickens’ most infamous female character and gives her a life, a voice, and a history that goes far beyond the jilted bride in the crumbling wedding dress. This is Charlotte Havisham: brewer’s daughter, businesswoman, and a woman undone by a charming and duplicitous conman.
It is a queer, feminist reimagining that is sharp, subversive, and surprisingly tender. If you love literary fiction with teeth, or if you have ever wondered what Miss Havisham was really about, this is for you.
Your Gateway to Discworld
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, read by Jon Culshaw
If you have never read Terry Pratchett, this is where to start. Do not begin at the beginning of Discworld. Even Neil Gaiman has said that is a terrible idea. Start here, with Captain Vimes and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, a ragtag group of officers trying to solve a case involving a dragon and a secret society in a city that runs on corruption and cynicism.
Pratchett is one of the funniest writers in the English language, but he is also one of the wisest. The new Penguin audiobook edition is brilliantly cast. Jon Culshaw narrates, Peter Serafinowicz voices Death, and Bill Nighy reads the footnotes as the voice of the author. It is perfect for long car journeys, and you will want the next one before you have finished this one.
The Summer Romance
Love Song by Elle Kennedy, read by Connor Crais and Erin Malone
Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus series is a massive hit right now, and Love Song is her latest standalone set in the same Briar university world. After a brutal breakup, college junior Blake Logan escapes to her family’s lake house in Tahoe, determined to shut out the world. Her plan: no men, no drama. Then Wyatt Graham shows up, four years older and far too good at getting under her skin.
If you want something light, romantic, and easy to lose a few hours to, this is the one. Kennedy knows exactly what she is doing with a summer romance, and the dual narration from Crais and Malone brings it to life.
The Easy Beach Read
The Underdog by Felicity Cloake, read by Heather Long
Every list needs one book that is pure fun, and this is it. Felicity Cloake is best known as a food writer (her Guardian “How to Make the Perfect…” column is legendary), and her debut novel is set in the London food scene with all the insider warmth and wit you would expect.
Katy is 36, recently dumped by her dull-yet-deceitful fiance, and has abandoned a solid career to become a chef. She is now making sandwiches in a north London cafe and stuck in a situationship with a twentysomething who thinks he is his generation’s Marco Pierre White. Then a gorgeous doctor walks in with a scruffy dog she cannot stand. Red magazine called it “the funny slow-burn love story you need to start summer properly,” and they are right. Light, charming, and exactly the audiobook you want on a sun lounger.
For Everyone Who Has Finished Slow Horses
Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron, read by Alix Dunmore
If you know Mick Herron from Slow Horses, you know he writes the best spy fiction in Britain. Down Cemetery Road is where it all started, his debut novel, set in Oxford. An explosion in a quiet suburb kills two people and leaves a young girl missing. Sarah Tucker becomes obsessed with finding her and enlists private investigator Zoe Boehm.
It is not a Slough House book, but it has all the hallmarks: dry wit, sharp plotting, and characters who are far more complicated than they first appear. It is a brilliant audiobook for anyone who has already burned through the Jackson Lamb series and wants more Herron.
The One That Took On Amazon
When the Revolution Comes by Chris Smalls, read by the author
Chris Smalls led the first successful unionisation of an Amazon warehouse in the United States. This is his account of how he did it: a deeply personal story about what it is like to be working class in America, what happens when you take on one of the most powerful companies on the planet, and what becomes possible when overworked, underpaid, and disempowered people join together.
Smalls was named to the Time 100 list of the most influential people of 2022. He narrates the audiobook himself, and his voice brings an urgency and authenticity that would be impossible to replicate. If you read Careless People and want to keep pulling at the thread of Big Tech and workers’ rights, this is the next one to pick up.
The Eye-Opener
We Need to Tax Billionaires by Gabriel Zucman, read by Des Yankson
We Need to Tax Billionaires by Gabriel Zucman, read by Des Yankson
This is not light beach reading, but if you want to understand why the global tax debate keeps heating up, French economist Gabriel Zucman lays it out with clarity and precision. His central argument is that a 2% annual levy on individuals worth more than €100 million would transform public finances without breaking a sweat. He explains how the ultra-rich use havens, loopholes, and political influence to pay less tax than their cleaners, and what we could do about it.
It is the kind of audiobook that makes you feel like you have actually learned something by the time you land.
Your Summer Listening, Sorted
All twenty of these audiobooks are available on xigxag, with no subscription required. Buy the ones you want, skip the ones you don’t, and pay from £7.99. The more you listen, the cheaper it gets.
If you want more from your audiobooks this summer, every title on xigxag comes with our listen-and-read feature: synchronised text so you can follow along, look up words, search within the book, and share quotes. It is perfect for planes, trains, and anywhere you might not want the volume on full.
Browse these titles in our summer 2026 audiobook collection on xigxag and start your summer listening.
