The Rabbit Hutch Audiobook by Tess Gunty— narrated by Tess Gunty, Scott Brick, Suzanne Toren, Kirby Heyborne, and Kyla Garcia

Why the audiobook wins

This one gets a full cast — Tess Gunty herself alongside Scott Brick, Suzanne Toren, Kirby Heyborne, and Kyla Garcia — and it's the right call for a novel this formally restless. Gunty's prose jumps registers constantly, from Blandine's feverish mysticism to the building's other tenants to fragments that read like found documents, and splitting those voices across performers keeps the novel's strangeness legible instead of muddy.

Having the author narrate her own Blandine chapters adds something you can't get from the page alone: Gunty's own sense of the character's cadence, unfiltered by an outside performer's interpretation. Paired with veteran narrators like Brick and Toren carrying the rest of the Rabbit Hutch's residents, the ensemble format matches a book that was never really about one voice.

This is literary fiction with teeth, strange and funny and aching by turns, and the multi-narrator format is part of what makes a single sweltering week feel like a whole apartment building's worth of lives. One credit covers the ensemble.