My favorite audiobooks of 2025

This was one of my first audiobooks of 2025 and it set the tone for a wonderful year of reading with my ears. The bold premise is this: on a delayed flight from Hobart to Sydney, an older lady goes into something like a trance, walks the center aisle, and tells every single passenger their age and cause of death. After the flight, some passengers try to laugh it off, but many are deeply disturbed by the woman's predictions and go on to 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 those of many of the people impacted by her predictions. As so often happens with Liane Moriarty novels, I was engrossed by the story—and then after the book gave up its secrets, I found myself lingering on its themes of probability, agency, and love, for long after I finished listening. This was especially great on audio, as narrated by Caroline Lee and Geraldine Hakewill. 15 hrs 53 mins. More info →

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 finished it nearly a year ago and still find myself thinking about and recommending it all the time. I’m so glad I opted for the audiobook; the excellent full cast includes Ed Helms, Paul Mescal, Jenny Slate, Nick Offerman, and others. 9 hrs 29 mins. More info →

I didn't make myself choose a hands-down-favorite for 2025, but if I did, this nonfiction collection would be a strong contender. 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 head-on instead of avoiding it by babying her nervous system. She skillfully uses that same approach in each essay, looking one by one at painful hinge moments from her life and engaging with the thorniest questions that linger. The audiobook as narrated by the author was perfection, and definitely the right book at the right time for me. 7 hrs 56 mins. More info →

I'd heard raves for years about Graff's 9/11 oral history ever 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 this summer and for reasons I cannot articulate, late this summer, I felt like it was finally 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. Narrated by a full 45-person cast. 15 hrs 55 mins. More info →

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. Narrated by Robertson Dean. 67 hrs. More info →

After all the challenging nonfiction I enjoyed in 2025, this lovely narrative was a story I could sink into with a big happy exhale. Author of the Dial A for Aunties and Vera Wong series 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 featured in our 2025 Fall Book Preview and was wonderful on audio, as narrated by Louisa Zhu and fan favorite Emily Woo Zeller. 11 hrs 19 mins. More info →

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. 14 hrs 5 mins. More info →