Red Queen Audiobook by Victoria Aveyard— narrated by Amanda Dolan

Why the audiobook wins

Most of Red Queen is Mare Barrow performing someone else. She is a Red thief passed off to a Silver court as a lost noblewoman, and every scene in the palace is a girl running an accent, an etiquette, and a set of manners that are not hers while a mind-reading queen sits across the table. Amanda Dolan plays both layers at once. You can hear the court voice going on over the top of Mare's own, and you can hear it slip. First-person present tense is hard to narrate without sounding breathless; Dolan keeps it controlled and lets the pressure do the work.

This is one of the natural next stops after The Hunger Games, though the stakes here sit at the dinner table rather than in an arena, and the last hundred pages rearrange everything you thought you understood about the two princes. Twelve and a half hours, and the series runs to four books.

Twelve hours and thirty-nine minutes, narrated by Amanda Dolan, free with an Audible trial. One credit gets you the whole first book.