Born a Crime Audiobook by Trevor Noah
2018 Audie Award · Male Narrator
Trevor Noah's memoir of growing up mixed-race in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa is funnier and stranger than its premise lets on. Eighteen linked essays turn a childhood spent partly in hiding into a sharp, generous portrait of language, survival, and one ferociously willful mother.
Why the audiobook wins
Trevor Noah narrates his own memoir, and the result is a masterclass in code-switching: he moves between English, Xhosa, and Zulu, and between his mother's voice and his own childhood one, without ever losing the comic timing that makes the hardest chapters bearable. It's why this recording won the Audie Award for Best Male Narrator, one of the audiobook industry's top honors.
At just under nine hours, it's an ideal commute or single-weekend listen, and hearing Noah perform his own family, especially his mother, gives the memoir an intimacy and specificity that the page can only gesture at. The accents aren't an accessory here; they're the story of a childhood spent translating between worlds.
Few memoirists can perform their own material this well, and one Audible credit covers all eighteen essays.
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