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My introduction to Stevenson’s audiobook work was Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (aka Pride and Prejudice for socialists) and I was just astounded at how fantastically she brought to life Margaret’s story.
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She has such a rich, warm voice that, to this North American reader’s ear at least, is just the kind of classically English that feels perfect for Austen and the like. If you’ve been wanting to (re)read some 18 th, 19 th, or early 20 th century women fiction masters like Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, and the Brontës through audiobooks, Stevenson is your woman. In my opinion, there is no one better performing classic British audiobooks than Juliet Stevenson. I also have to give him props for doing great women’s voices, something otherwise decent male audiobook narrators often screw up.
AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR SERIES
But that’s not all: Aaronovitch’s London is distinctly today’s bustling, multi-cultural one, which means the series allows Holdbrook-Smith ample opportunities to show off his incredible talent for authentic accents, including ones for different classes, Scottish, Irish, Nigerian, and a whole host of others for Londoners originating from all over the world. Holdbrook-Smith has an incredibly smooth, sexy voice that is perfect for the young biracial (Nigerian and English) police constable and sorcerer’s apprentice Peter Grant.
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Have you ever had a crush on an audiobook narrator without even having seen what they look like? Yeah, that was my experience with Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, who I was introduced to through his performances of Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant urban fantasy detective series, aka the Rivers of London series, aka the grown-up Harry Potter I’ve always wanted. Also check out more audiobooks by Black authors read by Black audiobook narrators. Check out this great interview with Robin Miles right here on Book Riot. She voices Black characters in the U.S., the Caribbean, Nigeria and other lands real and imaginary with equal authenticity, so well that after listening to many of her books I still had no idea what her accent in real life was. In order to excel at such a range of genres, Miles shows off an astounding ability to embody characters in different times and places. Jemisin, bell hooks, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Audre Lorde, Chinelo Okparanta, Angela Davis, Roxane Gay, and so many more! You know an audiobook narrator is versatile when her resumé includes science fiction, literary fiction, memoir, and children’s fiction, to name only a few genres. She has narrated over 350 audiobooks! In particular, she’s made a career bringing to life incredible books by Black women authors such as N.K. The award-winning and much-loved Robin Miles is a hugely prolific audiobook performer. Without further ado, here are the five best audiobook narrators (according to me only, of course). These five narrators all have the qualities I treasure in audiobook readers: versatility in the character voices they can do, wide range of spot-on accents, and amazing extent of emotion and expressiveness. I mean voice actors who are so amazing at their jobs that while listening to the audiobooks they are performing I lose all awareness that I am listening to a human reading a story and I just feel completely immersed, like I am right there in the book. But the best audiobook narrators take it to the next level. There are a lot of great audiobook narrators out there.