Is there an audiobook of The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1)?

Yes. The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Mark Deakins.

How long is the The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) audiobook?

The The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) audiobook runs 10 hr 50 min.

Is The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) on Kindle Unlimited?

No. The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 15, 2026.

The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) by James Dashner book cover for the Book of the Day young adult book review

Our score

4.6/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDSeptember 2009

Genres

Fiction Young Adult Dystopian

Themes

Memory, identity, and rebuilding a self from nothingSurveillance disguised as survivalCommunity rules formed under existential threatTrust built through defying established order

The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1)

Name: The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1)
Price: 5.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: James Dashner

James Dashner

Thomas wakes up with no memory in a lift rising toward a walled-in field of teenage boys, and every answer he wants sits behind a maze that resets itself every night. James Dashner's YA dystopian survival story is built almost entirely out of withheld information, and that restraint is what makes it move.

The Review

Our take

Thomas wants to know two things when he arrives in the Glade: who he is, and why the boys already living there won't just tell him what's going on. He gets neither answer for a long time, and that refusal is the engine of the whole book. Dashner strips his protagonist of a name's worth of backstory and drops him into a self-governing society of boys who've built farms, kept livestock, and established a legal code, all while living inside four towering stone walls that open every morning onto a maze that rearranges its own corridors every night.

The maze itself is the best thing here, because Dashner treats it like an actual engineering problem rather than a vague menace. Runners map the corridors by hand, memorizing patterns before the walls shift and erase a day's work. Grievers, part-machine and part-flesh, patrol at night and make staying past the closing walls a death sentence rather than a dramatic inconvenience. None of this gets explained up front. You piece together the Glade's rules the way Thomas does, by watching what the other boys are afraid of and what they've stopped questioning after two years of living there, and that slow accretion of world logic is what makes the tension work. A maze that changes shape every night is a statement about the whole premise: nobody in this story gets to feel safe in what they know.

Dashner is smart about who Thomas becomes once he's inside this system. Within his first days he does something none of the established Runners have managed: he goes into the maze at night and survives. That single act reframes him from newcomer to threat, because a society that's spent two years building careful rules around survival suddenly has a kid who breaks them and lives. The other boys' suspicion of Thomas makes complete sense once you see the community through their eyes: they've learned the hard way that rule-breaking gets people killed, right up until it doesn't.

The arrival of Teresa, the first and only girl to ever come up in the lift, does more structural work than a typical love-interest entrance. She carries a message that reframes the entire premise, and her connection to Thomas, an inexplicable psychic link neither of them asked for, gives the back half of the book a second mystery running alongside the maze itself. Dashner doesn't rush to explain that bond either, and the payoff arrives in a finale that recontextualizes nearly everything the boys believed about why they're trapped there.

Where the book runs into real friction is dialogue and slang. The Gladers have invented their own cursing system, "klunk" and "shuck" standing in for words Dashner clearly wants to avoid, and it's a choice that some readers bounce off immediately. It reads a little like a filter placed over otherwise blunt teenage speech, and the made-up vocabulary takes a chapter or two to stop feeling artificial. Once it settles into background noise, though, it stops being a distraction and starts reading as evidence of an isolated society developing its own culture rather than an author dodging profanity.

Why you should read

Readers who like a mystery doled out in careful, late-arriving pieces
Fans of survival stories with genuine social structure and stakes
Anyone who enjoys a physical setting that functions like a puzzle
YA dystopian readers who want the worldbuilding to reward patience

What to expect

A slow, fragment-based reveal of what the Glade actually is
Invented in-world slang that takes a chapter to stop feeling artificial
A maze that changes nightly, treated as a real engineering problem
A finale that recontextualizes the entire premise at once

The pacing rewards patience in a way some readers find frustrating: information arrives late and in fragments, and Thomas spends a lot of the book reacting to things he doesn't understand rather than driving the plot forward himself. That's a deliberate choice, mirroring his own disorientation, but it means the book's momentum builds rather than sprints, at least until the final quarter, when the maze's real purpose and the Glade's real function come apart all at once. What sticks with me is a single reversal near the end: the walls closing at night were never really about the Grievers getting in. They were about something being watched.

Reviewed by Rowan · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.6/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1)?: Yes. The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Mark Deakins.
Listen to The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) audiobook?: The The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) audiobook runs 10 hr 50 min.
Is The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) on Kindle Unlimited?: No. The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 15, 2026.
How much does The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $5.99, Paperback $7.97, Hardcover $10.92. Prices as of August 22, 2026 at 3:45 AM EDT and may change.

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Common questions

What is The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) about?: Thomas wants to know two things when he arrives in the Glade: who he is, and why the boys already living there won't just tell him what's going on. He gets neither answer for a long time, and that refusal is the engine of the whole book. Dashner strips his protagonist of a name's worth of…
Is The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) worth reading?: We scored The Maze Runner (The Maze Runner, Book 1) 4.6 out of 5. Thomas wakes up with no memory in a lift rising toward a walled-in field of teenage boys, and every answer he wants sits behind a maze that resets itself every night. James Dashner's YA dystopian survival story is built almost entirely out of withheld information, and that…