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Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola audiobook review – a debut that dances with passion

The dancer and author gives this collection clarity and warmth as he narrates poems about family, queer identity, hedonism and race

The first poetry collection from the Nigerian American dancer and poet Oluwaseun Olayiwola explores themes of race, family, queer identity, hedonism and the body. Strange Beach takes its title from Claudia Rankine’s poem Citizen: An American Lyric which describes “each body is a strange beach, and if you let in the excess emotion, you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads”. The shoreline is a recurring image in Strange Beach’s poems, a threshold where forces collide and the landscape is forever changing shape.

Olayiwola’s verse dances between the abstract and the philosophical, and there are instances when the narrative thread is discarded and meaning is hard to glean. Clarity comes with hearing it read out loud, however. Olayiwola’s narration brims with warmth and passion, allowing us to bask in imagery, atmosphere and the speaker’s rich interior world.

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The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley audiobook review – a topical time-hopping romance

Actor Katie Leung narrates this genre-bending debut in which an Victorian Arctic explorer is catapulted into our brave new world

The Ministry of Time opens in the middle of a job interview. The applicant, a nameless British Cambodian civil servant, is in line for a role that involves working with expats of “high-interest status and particular needs”. When she asks where these expats come from, she is told: “History.” The interviewer adds, casually, “We have time travel.”

Listeners concerned about the practicalities of this time-hopping tale will be reassured by our protagonist’s observation that contemplating the physics leads to a “crock of shit”, so it is best not dwelled upon. “All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time but had not yet experimented with doing it.” Her job, then, is to act as minder or “bridge” to individuals removed from their eras and bounced into the present.

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The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury review – a hymn to positivity

The science writer pragmatically shows how optimism can bring about real improvements in everyday life and change in the wider world

Can optimism influence events in your life? Does fate smile upon those who see the glass as half full? The science writer Sumit Paul-Choudhury believes so. The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World is his hymn to positivity, though fear not: it’s not a self-help book and there is more to it than platitudes about manifesting and living your best life.

The author realised he was a natural optimist following the premature death of his wife from cancer. In the aftermath, he made an active decision “not to spend any more time in limbo than I already had” and “cultivated the idea that the future would be bright”. Optimism is, he says, “central to the human psyche”. It fosters social progress and encourages individuals to be resilient and withstand stress, to be more successful at work and create stronger bonds with friends and family. Among the models for optimism offered here are Ernest Shackleton who, along with his crew, survived being stranded in the Antarctic, and Helen Keller, who lost her hearing and sight after a childhood illness and later, in her 1903 essay Optimism, wrote about discovering hope and joy.

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A Particularly Nasty Case by Adam Kay audiobook review – a wayward doctor turns detective

Andy Serkis revels in his narration of the first murder mystery from the author of This Is Going to Hurt, which showcases Kay’s signature pitch-black humour

Dr Eitan Rose is stark naked in a gay sauna when he is called upon to perform CPR on an elderly man and fellow patron who is having a heart attack. When arriving paramedics ask Eitan for his details, he declines to give his real name, instead giving them the name of his work supervisor and nemesis, Douglas Moran. Eitan is a hard-partying consultant rheumatologist who has just returned to work after several months off following a mental health crisis, and who uses liquid cocaine secreted into a nasal inhaler to get through the working day.

When Moran dies in unexpected circumstances, Eitan suspects foul play and sets about finding the culprit. Soon he is performing illicit postmortems and impersonating a police detective so he can cross-examine a suspect. But when he tries to blow the whistle, his colleagues and the police decline to take his claims seriously. Eitan may work among medical professionals, but they are not above stigmatising a colleague diagnosed with bipolar disorder and taking his outlandish claims as evidence of his instability.

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Ncuti Gatwa leads star winners at first Speakies awards for audio storytelling

The actor won best performance for BBC drama Gatsby in Harlem at the inaugural British Audio awards, while Nicola Coughlan’s narration of Juno Dawson’s Queen B clinched best sci-fi audiobook

Audiobooks narrated by Ncuti Gatwa, Nicola Coughlan and David Tennant were among those recognised at the inaugural British Audio awards, the “Speakies”.

Gatwa’s performance in the lead role of Gatsby in Harlem helped it emerge as one of Monday evening’s biggest winners: it took three major prizes including audio of the year. The reimagining of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby also won best audio drama adaptation, while Gatwa took home the best performance award for what organisers described as his “remarkable poise and flair” in capturing Gatsby’s character.

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Feminist History for Every Day of the Year by Kate Mosse review – the women who helped change the world

The bestselling author champions female trailblazers in an enjoyable anthology for all ages

Women make up roughly 50% of the population but only feature in about 0.5% of recorded history. In Feminist History for Every Day of the Year, Kate Mosse, the bestselling author of Labyrinth, celebrates can-do women and gives history’s trailblazers their due. Aimed at teenage readers but just as enjoyable for adults, this anthology comprises bite-sized stories of female achievement and the centuries-old fight for equality. As Mosse notes in the introduction, it is about women “who refused to accept the limitations put on them, who campaigned and marched, battled and challenged the status quo to change the world for the better”.

The book features a mixture of famous and lesser-known figures: artists, writers, scientists, academics, sportswomen, educators and politicians. There’s primatologist Dian Fossey; avant garde painter Amrita Sher-Gil; Britain’s first black headteacher Beryl Gilroy; Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai; Ethiopian politician and humanitarian Senedu Gebru; racehorse trainer Florence Nagle; computer programmers Ada Lovelace and Dorothy Vaughan; and actor and music hall star Josephine Baker, who was also a pilot and agent in the French resistance during the second world war. Not all the assembled achievers are straightforwardly heroic – Marie Stopes may have founded Britain’s first ever birth control clinic in 1921, but she also believed in eugenics.

Available via Pan Macmillan, 10hr 16min

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Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah audiobook review – coming-of-age saga in Tanzania

Three young people step boldly into their adult lives in this elegantly narrated novel from the Nobel laureate

The Nobel prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah is known for his portrayals of east Africans and the after-effects of colonial rule. Opening in Zanzibar in the aftermath of independence, his 11th novel, Theft, spans half a century as it documents the lives of Karim, Fauzia and Badar. We learn how young Karim is treated as “an afterthought” by his mother, Raya, who divorces her much older husband and leaves her son behind to start a new life.

Mother and son are reunited several years later in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where Raya has married a pharmacist named Haji. Karim, who grows up to be handsome, intelligent and more than a little conceited, gets a scholarship to study in the city and meets Fauzia, who is training to be a teacher and is keen to avoid the fate of other “mute daughter[s] laid out for deflowering”. She and Karim marry, and the pair open their home to Badar, a former servant of Raya and Haji’s who was abandoned by his parents as a child.

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The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits audiobook review – an American road trip with a twist

A law professor leaves his failing marriage and faltering career and hits the open road in this Booker-shortlisted novel of midlife turmoil

At the start of The Rest of Our Lives, we learn that Tom, a 55-year-old law professor from New York, plans to leave his wife just as soon as he has dropped their youngest child off at college. Tom and Amy have been together for 30 years. He believes theirs to be a “C-minus marriage” which was irreparably ruptured when Amy had an affair 12 years previously. And so, after leaving their daughter Miriam at college in Pittsburgh, he keeps on driving, revisiting old friends and places in search of his departed youth.

Benjamin Markovits’s 12th novel – which has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize – could be seen as a companion piece to Miranda July’s celebrated All Fours in its exploration of the dissatisfaction of middle age. Tom is not a reliable narrator of his life, though he is nonetheless a compelling protagonist even in his flagrant moments of self-deception.

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Lyra’s last story – exclusive extract from Philip Pullman’s final installment in The Book of Dust trilogy

Thirty years ago, The Northern Lights introduced the world to Lyra Silvertongue. Now, Pullman completes her story in The Rose Field – plus listen to an audiobook extract read by Michael Sheen

She washed herself as well as she could in the little basin with its lukewarm water, and looked in the mirror dispassionately. The bruises on her face were fading, but she was tanned by the sun, and her cheeks and the bridge of her nose not far off from being actually burnt, so she must find some cream or ointment to deal with that. A broad-brimmed hat would help too.

She spread a very little of the rose salve on her nose and lips, her cheekbones and forehead. Then she sat down and thought about Ionides.

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Yorùbá Boy Running by Biyi Bándélé audiobook review – from enslaved teenager to celebrated preacher

The novelist’s final work tells a remarkable tale of resilience, based on the life of Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, who was kidnapped by slavers but won his freedom

Set in 19th-century Òsogùn in what is now Nigeria, Yorùbá Boy Running opens with 13-year-old Àjàyí reporting a premonition to his mother about dark days ahead. A week later, the town is surrounded by Malian slave raiders and Àjàyí is kidnapped along with his mother, sister, best friend and neighbours. He is taken to Lagos and sold to Portuguese slavers preparing to ship their human cargo to the Americas. But they are intercepted by the British navy, which releases Àjàyí in Sierra Leone, where he is recruited by missionaries. From there, he is put on a path that leads to him to study at Oxford and become a celebrated preacher, linguist and abolitionist who meets Queen Victoria.

A remarkable tale of barbarism and resilience, Yorùbá Boy Running is the final work by the Nigerian novelist and film-maker Biyi Bándélé, who died in 2022 aged 54. Weaving in Africa’s colonial history and imagined – and improbably comic – conversations between warring Yorùbá factions, it is based on the real-life story of Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, who was kidnapped in 1821 and sold into slavery. Crowther secured his freedom and went on to become the first Black Anglican bishop in west Africa.

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