The Priory of the Orange Tree (The Roots of Chaos) Audiobook by Samantha Shannon

Why the audiobook wins

Liyah Summers narrates The Priory of the Orange Tree across its full, sprawling cast, and the audio format does real work here: a story split between a dragon-worshipping East and a dragon-fearing West needs a reader who can hold two entire belief systems and their separate vocabularies distinct without losing the thread, and Summers keeps Tané's and Ead's very different worlds legible scene to scene.

This is a doorstopper of a fantasy, dense with court intrigue and dragon lore, and audio turns that density into something you can absorb gradually rather than muscle through — ideal for a long stretch of commutes or a big travel week where you can sink into one story for hours at a time.

Shannon built a genuinely epic, single-volume fantasy here, structurally ambitious in a genre that usually spreads that scope across a trilogy. Hearing it read aloud makes the scale feel earned rather than exhausting, and one Audible credit gets you the whole world.