2025 Audie Award Finalists
Audie Awards recognize the best books in audiobook form, often elevating the written word by the audio performance. Check out a selection of the finalists for 2025, with the full list available at https://www.audiopub.org/2025audies! Annotations from AudioFile, unless otherwise attributed.
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George Orwell’s 1984 Audiobook
AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR Starring Andrew Garfield as Winston, Cynthia Erivo as Julia, Andrew Scott as the alluring, mysterious O’Brien, and featuring Tom Hardy as Big Brother, Audible presents a new dramatization of George Orwell’s classic tale. An immersive listening experience like none you’ve heard before, at a time when it has all never felt more chillingly relevant. (Audible description)
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My Name Is Barbra
AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR This is a nuanced, opinionated memoir written and narrated by one of the greatest entertainers ever, EGOT-winning Barbra Streisand.
Format: Downloadable Audiobook
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Playground
AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR "The fate of continents is written in water," this audiobook professes, and the vital role of the ocean is at the heart of this expansive listening experience. Here, especially at the start, it is wise to let the narrators' words flow forth, immersing the listener in four central characters and the minute details that comprise their respective worlds.
Format: Downloadable Audiobook
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Poor Deer
AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR There's a strange fable-like quality to this novel about grief and the stories children tell to make sense of it...As a girl, Margaret loses her best friend in a tragic accident. Her role in the death is murky, and as she grows older, her memory of events takes on a life of its own.
Format: Downloadable Audiobook
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The Sing Sing Files
AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR When NBC "Dateline" reporter and producer Dan Slepian stumbled upon evidence that a number of men serving lengthy terms in the New York State prison system may have been innocent, he couldn't let it go. In a voice bristling with urgency, empathy, and determination, Slepian recounts how false identification, racial profiling, prosecutorial misconduct, incentivized witnesses, and just being in the wrong place at the wrong time can get an innocent citizen convicted of murder and sent to prison for life.
Format: Downloadable Audiobook
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Black Shield Maiden
FANTASY Author Willow Smith narrates this audiobook, which is set when the Vikings are raiders who worship Odin. The tale focuses on Yafeu, who is taken from her village in Ghana by slave traders and freed by Alvtir, the female leader of the Viking raiders, only to be enslaved again when the Vikings arrive home.
Format: Downloadable Audiobook
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Bookshops & Bonedust
FANTASY Author/narrator Travis Baldree returns with a prequel to LEGENDS & LATTES, set 20 years earlier. Viv, a mercenary orc, has been injured in a campaign against a necromancer and needs to heal. Looking for distraction, Viv hangs out in a run-down bookstore owned by a foulmouthed rattkin and discovers a love of reading, some good friends, and a little romance.
Format: Downloadable Audiobook
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The Bright Sword
FANTASY Nicholas Guy Smith evokes the Arthurian legends of old in this tongue-in-cheek Knights of the Round Table-inspired novel.
Format: Downloadable Audiobook
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Goddess of the River
FANTASY Sneha Mathan gives a dramatic performance of this story about Ganga, the Hindu mythological goddess of the river. Mathan's resonant voice adds emotional depth to her portrayal of Ganga, who experiences mortality before she is transformed back into a goddess who is unable to shed her bonds with the human experience--or the mortal son she has been forced to leave behind.
Format: Downloadable Audiobook
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Someone You Can Build A Nest in
FANTASY Carmen Rose narrates this sapphic horror/romance with a sardonic wit that makes for an immersive listening experience. Shesheshen is a shape-shifting monster who, weary of devouring an endless line of hunters seeking to eradicate her kind, constructs a makeshift human body and infiltrates the human world. What she doesn't expect is to fall for Homily, a human woman who is haunted by a family curse.
Format: Downloadable Audiobook
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