Music to your ears: 6 audiobooks we’re listening to on BorrowBox

28th March 2024
Music to your ears: 6 audiobooks we’re listening to on BorrowBox

There are so many reasons to love audiobooks.

+ You can listen anytime, anywhere on your phone or tablet, making traffic jams much more bearable, or the bus journey go by in a flash.

+ You can multi-task - listen while you cook dinner, load the dishwasher, or relax on the sofa.

+ You can enjoy hearing incredible actors bring these stories to life, adding a whole new dimension to your reading experience.

We have hundreds of audiobooks available on BorrowBox. It works just the Library – if the item you want is already on loan, click to reserve it and receive a notification once it’s ready.

Don’t want to wait? Listen to this month’s BorrowBox Unlimited, no need to reserve, just dive right in! Our Unlimited title this month is The Other Half by Charlotte Vassell, a gripping debut crime thriller packed with suspense – with the technicolour wit of ‘Knives Out’. Listen now.

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1. Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones – Dolly Parton

Humour, memoir, music

Global superstar Dolly Parton shares, for the first time, the full story behind her lifelong passion for fashion, including how she developed her own distinctly Dolly style, which has defied convention and endeared her to fans around the world.

Featuring behind-the-scenes stories from Dolly Parton’s life and career, this audiobook spotlights her most unforgettable looks from the 1960s to now. The sky-high heels, famous wigs, bold makeup, eye-catching stage clothes – she shares them all. Along the way, Parton discusses memorable outfits from her past and the daring styles that continue to entertain and inspire today. Listen here.

 

2. Good Omens – Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

Fantasy, full-cast dramatisation

Witchfinder Shadwell and his assistant Newton Pulsifier are enroute to Tadfield to investigate unusual phenomena in the area, while Anathema Device, descendent of prophetess Agnes Nutter, tries to decipher her ancestor’s cryptic predictions.

Atlantis is rising; fish are falling from the sky; everything seems to be going to the Divine Plan.

Everything, that is, but for an unlikely angel and demon duo, who have been living on Earth for several millennia and have become rather fond of the place. If they are to prevent Armageddon they’ve got to find and kill the one who will bring it about: the Antichrist himself. There’s just one small problem: someone seems to have mislaid him... Listen here.

3. The Dark Remains – William McIlvanney & Ian Rankin

Best-selling author, crime thriller, witty

In this scorching crime hook-up, number one bestseller Ian Rankin and Scottish crime-writing legend William McIlvanney join forces for the first ever case of DI Laidlaw, Glasgow’s original gritty detective.

Lawyer Bobby Carter did a lot of work for the wrong type of people. Now he’s dead and it was no accident. Besides a distraught family and a heap of powerful friends, Carter’s left behind his share of enemies. So, who dealt the fatal blow?

DC Jack Laidlaw’s reputation precedes him. He’s not a team player, but he’s got a sixth sense for what’s happening on the streets. His boss chalks the violence up to the usual rivalries, but is it that simple? As two Glasgow gangs go to war, Laidlaw needs to find out who got Carter before the whole city explodes. Listen here.

 

4. The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne – Freya North

Contemporary fiction, nostalgic, joyful

Eadie Browne is an odd child with unusual parents, living in a strange house neighbouring the local cemetery. Bullied at school – but protected by her two best friends Celeste and Josh, and her many imaginary friends lying six feet under next door – Eadie muddles her way through.

Arriving in Manchester as a student in the late 1980s, Eadie confronts a busy, gritty Victorian metropolis a far cry from the small Garden City she's left behind. Soon enough she experiences a novel freedom she never imagined and it's seductive. She can be who she wants to be, do as she pleases, and no one back home needs to know. As Manchester embraces the dizzying, colourful euphoria of Rave counterculture, Eadie is swept along, blithely ignoring danger and reality. Until, one night, her past comes hurtling at her with ramifications which will continue into her adult life.

Now, as the new Millennium beckons, Eadie is turning 30 with a marriage in tatters. She must travel back to where she once lived for a funeral she can't quite comprehend. Listen here. 

5. Silverview– John le Carré

Sunday Times bestseller, political fiction, espionage

Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the City for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian's evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems to know a lot about Julian's family and is rather too interested in the inner workings of his modest new enterprise.

When a letter turns up at the door of a spy chief in London warning him of a dangerous leak, the investigations lead him to this quiet town by the sea...

Silverview is the mesmerising story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. In this last complete masterwork from the greatest chronicler of our age, John le Carré asks what you owe to your country when you no longer recognise it. Listen here.

 

6. The Dictionary of Lost Words – Pip Williams

Historical fiction, award winning

In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word bondmaid flutter to the floor unclaimed. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men.

Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others – that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. She begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Listen here.

 

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