“North Woods” by Daniel Mason
It begins with a flat stone plucked from the earth and placed in a clearing at the base of a mountain. A kind of Genesis, giving way to an Edenic apple farm, followed by 300 years of corruption, sorrow, ambition, deception, isolation, love. Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” read by a full cast, is a kind of Odyssean epic in which the hero doesn’t leave home —a New England house and its inhabitants, over the three-century history of America.
There’s the story of an apple farmer, a Revolutionary War defector named Charles Osgood, rendered in all his gruff self-importance by the British narrator Simon Vance; the letters from the landscape painter William Henry Teale to a beloved “friend” that escalate in desperation and longing, with Mark Deakins’s placid and dignified reading giving way to a more tortured cadence; Mark Bramhall telling (among others) the heart-wrenching saga of Osgood’s twin daughters, whose inseparable bond after their father’s death is tested by temptation to explore the world beyond their property lines.
Like the unforgettable audiobook production of George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Mason’s historical fiction advertises a singular strength of the form: alchemizing an ensemble of distinct voices into a harmonious, deeply resonant whole. (Random House Audio. 11 hours, 5 minutes. $22.50.)
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“How to Say Babylon: A Memoir” by Safiya Sinclair
After her strict Rastafari father threatens to kick her out of the family home for standing up to his verbal abuse, a teenage Safiya Sinclair looks out into the darkness of the Jamaican mountains, “the thick countryside where our first slave rebellion was born,” and sees the specter of a woman dressed in white, her dreadlocked head bowed “under the gaze of a Rastaman.” The woman, she realizes, is herself, a harbinger of “the future that awaited me at my father’s hands.”
While “all the rage had been smothered out of” this recurring apparition in “How to Say Babylon: A Memoir,” the same cannot be said of the author, who seethes and roars with emotion throughout this affecting account of growing up under her father’s violent and controlling hand — and of escaping it to become an award-winning poet.
Hovering above the sadness and anger are Sinclair’s vivid memories: of her mother Esther’s laughter and her soothing touch as they “fold into each other in the living room” before school, of the golden rolling paper Esther carried for the ganja whose aroma “clung to me like I clung to Mom.” She recalls her three younger siblings’ greasy fingers and gleeful screeching, her father’s repeated chant, “Fire bun Babylon!,” which he “turned … on his tongue like prayer.” Sinclair spins her own incantations out of the landscapes of her upbringing — first the fishing village lined with zinc-roofed shanties, hibiscus trees and cinder blocks; then the “towering blue mahoes and primeval ferns” farther inland, the “serried and vigilant” mountain ridge of her later childhood — her voice as sensuous as a siren song. (Simon & Schuster Audio. 16 hours, 46 minutes. $29.99.)
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“The Fraud” by Zadie Smith
Which impostor does the title of Zadie Smith’s sixth novel, “The Fraud,” refer to? Is it a novelist, William Ainsworth, whose fame and social status belie the critical reception of his work? Is it his housekeeper, Eliza Touchet? Or is it the so-called Claimant, the man presenting himself as Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to a noble fortune who was believed to have died in a shipwreck, inspiring a trial that captures the maniacal attention of the English public?
With the virtuosic agility of an actor in a one-woman play, Smith as narrator fully embodies each of her many distinct characters — using exaggeratedly quaint Edinburgh brogue, Cockney, even Jamaican patois — who expose the ways in which every one of us misrepresents ourselves somehow or other. This is a novel of manners that — thanks to the author’s ear for comic timing and eviscerating social commentary — is vigorously, insistently funny. (Penguin Audio.12 hours, 26 minutes. $25.)
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“Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” by Naomi Klein
“The uncanniness provoked by doppelgangers is particularly acute because the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you,” Naomi Klein says in “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” an elegant hybrid of memoir and social science that traces the motif of the double throughout history, literature and Klein’s personal life.
Sick of being confused with the ’90s feminist-turned-conspiracist Naomi Wolf, Klein uses her own exasperation as a lens onto the black-and-white bifurcation of almost every aspect of contemporary life: the economic inequality made even more stark by the sacrifices of essential workers to protect the wealthy from COVID-19; the stigma of being on the autism spectrum and the parents who deny their children lifesaving vaccines in hopes of avoiding it; fitness influencers who condemn “less healthy” bodies for their susceptibility to disease.
Rather than alienating the “other side,” as it were, Klein uses the doppelganger rubric to pull the unfamiliar closer, seeking out thoughtful context for how seemingly irreconcilable factions arrived at their extremes. “This is the trouble with the Mirror World,” she says, her tone very the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house. “There is always some truth mixed in with the lies.” (Macmillan Audio. 14 hours, 47 minutes. $32.99.)
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“Same Bed Different Dreams” by Ed Park
Intertwining the recorded pasts of Korean colonization and American imperialism with speculative plots involving an underground rebellion and a parasitic tech company, Ed Park’s second novel, “Same Bed Different Dreams,” hits you over the head with the blunt force of its organizing quandary, again and again: “What is history?”
But thanks to the ingenuity of Park’s storytelling and the prowess of the audiobook’s narrators, Daniel K. Isaac, Dominic Hoffman and Shannon Tyo, the listener doesn’t mind the repetition. If anything, we need all the signposts we can get in this intricate maze, which winds through alternate histories, dreamlike impossibilities and books within books.
Park’s novel braids together three narratives that overlap in sometimes rewarding, sometimes confounding, ways. Isaac reads “The Sins,” about a Korean American tech employee who becomes obsessed with the titular unfinished manuscript that falls into his hands; Tyo reads the manuscript itself, a translated work of alleged nonfiction by Echo, the nom de plume of an elusive Korean writer who may or may not be alive; and Hoffman reads “2333,” a science fiction series by a Black veteran of the Korean War. Characters, too, repeat, tempting the listener to draw connections that prove so tenuous they vanish as quickly as they arrive.
That’s OK. The point isn’t to grasp every detail. The fun in this audiobook is the hallucinatory joy of witnessing real life crash head-first into heartfelt, hilarious nonsense. As in art, so in life. (Random House Audio. 18 hours, 36 minutes. $25.)
