Blog

Top selling fantasy audiobooks, July 2012

Fantasy audiobooks are just getting better and better. The very best narrators are reading the very best books and the result is that the genre is now amongst he most popular on Audible.co.uk. A Game of Thrones is a popular as ever and although Stephen King’s The Stand is over thirty years old it has only just become available on the UK Audible store. Some Kind of Fairy Tale is definitely my next download. If, like me, you no longer have as much time to read as you once did, and especially if you have a daily commute, you should give audiobooks a try – sometimes the listening can be even more enjoyable than the reading (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and The Dark Tower series being just two examples).

Below is a list of the ten most downloaded fantasy audiobooks during July 2012:

  1. A Game of Thrones (Part One): Book 1 of A Song of Ice and Fire
    UNABRIDGED
    By George R. R. Martin, narrated by Roy Dotrice
    This first volume in the hugely popular and highly acclaimed epic fantasy series A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE is unabridged and split into two parts. Now a major Sky Atlantic TV series from HBO, starring Sean Bean. Summers span decades. Winter can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne has begun. It will stretch from the south, where heat breeds plot, lusts and intrigues; to the vast and savage eastern lands; all the way to the frozen north, where an 800-foot wall of ice protects the kingdom from the dark forces that lie beyond. Kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars, lords and honest men… all will play the Game of Thrones. Winter is coming…
  2. The Stand
    UNABRIDGED
    By Stephen King, narrated by Grover Gardner
    First came the days of the plague. Then came the dreams. Dark dreams that warned of the coming of the dark man. The apostate of death, his worn-down boot heels tramping the night roads. The warlord of the charnel house and Prince of Evil. His time is at hand. His empire grows in the west and the Apocalypse looms. For hundreds of thousands of fans who read The Stand in its original version and wanted more, this new edition is Stephen King’s gift. And those who are listening to The Stand for the first time will discover a triumphant and eerily plausible work of the imagination that takes on the issues that will determine our survival.
  3. Some Kind of Fairy Tale
    UNABRIDGED
    By Graham Joyce, narrated by John Lee
    Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a very English story. A story of woods and clearings, a story of folk tales and family histories. It is as if Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris had written a fairy tale together. It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phone call from his parents, asking him to come round. It pulls him away from his wife and children and into a bewildering mystery. He arrives at his parents’ house and discovers that they have a visitor. His sister, Tara. Not so unusual you might think, this is Christmas after all, a time when families get together. But 20 years ago, Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back – and as the years went by with no word from her, the family, unspoken, assumed that she was dead. Now she’s back, tired, dirty, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about 20 years spent travelling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim. But her stories don’t quite hang together, and once she has cleaned herself up and got some sleep, it becomes apparent that the intervening years have been very kind to Tara. She really does look no different from the young women who walked out the door 20 years ago. Peter’s parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter and his best friend, Richie, Tara’s one-time boyfriend, are not so sure. Tara seems happy enough, but there is something about her… a haunted, otherworldly quality. Some would say it’s as if she’s off with the fairies. And as the months go by, Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family…
  4. A Game of Thrones (Part Two): Book 1 of A Song of Ice and Fire
    UNABRIDGED
    By George R. R. Martin, narrated by Roy Dotrice
  5. The Name of the Wind (Part One)
    UNABRIDGED
    By Patrick Rothfuss, narrated by Rupert Degas
    ‘I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. My name is Kvothe. You may have heard of me’ So begins the tale of Kvothe – now an unassuming innkeepter – from his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, through his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-riddled city, to his daringly brazen bid to enter a difficult and dangerous school of magic. In part one you will come to know Kvothe the notorious magician, the accomplished thief, the masterful musician, the dragon-slayer, the legend-hunter, the lover, the thief and the infamous assassin.
  6. The Long Earth
    UNABRIDGED
    By Terry Pratchett , Stephen Baxter, narrated by Michael Fenton Stevens
    The Western Front, 1916. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong, and the wind in the leaves in the trees. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of No Man’s Land gone? Madison, Wisconsin, 2015. Cop Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive – some said mad, others dangerous – scientist when she finds a curious gadget: a box containing some wiring, a three-way switch and a potato. It is the prototype of an invention that will change the way Mankind views his world forever. And that’s an understatement if ever there was one…
  7. The Hobbit, Part 1
    UNABRIDGED | view abridged
    By J. R. R. Tolkien, narrated by Rob Inglis
    Smaug certainly looked fast asleep, when Bilbo peeped once more from the entrance. He was just about to step out onto the floor when he caught a sudden thin ray of red from under the drooping lid of Smaug’s left eye. He was only pretending to be sleep! He was watching the tunnel entrance! Whisked from his comfortable hobbit-hole by Gandalf the wizard and a band of dwarves, Bilbo Baggins finds himself caught up in a plot to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon.
  8. Whispers Under Ground: Rivers of London, Book 3
    UNABRIDGED
    By Ben Aaronovitch, narrated by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
    Peter Grant is learning magic fast. And it’s just as well – he’s already had run ins with the deadly supernatural children of the Thames and a terrifying killer in Soho. Progression in the police force is less easy, especially when you work in a department of two. A department that doesn’t even officially exist. A department that if you did describe it to most people would get you laughed at. And then there’s his love life. The last person he fell for ended up seriously dead. It wasn’t his fault, but still. Now something horrible is happening in the labyrinth of tunnels that make up the tube system that honeycombs the ancient foundations of London. And delays on the Northern line is the very least of it. Time to call in the Met’s Economic and Specialist Crime Unit 9, aka ‘The Folly’. Time to call in PC Peter Grant, Britains Last Wizard.
  9. Shadow of Night
    UNABRIDGED
    By Deborah Harkness, narrated by Jennifer Ikeda
    It began with A Discovery of Witches. Historian Diana Bishop, descended from a line of powerful witches, and long-lived vampire Matthew Clairmont have broken the laws dividing creatures. When Diana discovered a significant alchemical manuscript in the Bodleian Library, she sparked a struggle in which she became bound to Matthew. Now the fragile coexistence of witches, daemons, vampires and humans is dangerously threatened. Seeking safety, Diana and Matthew travel back in time to London, 1590. But they soon realise that the past may not provide a haven. Reclaiming his former identity as poet and spy for Queen Elizabeth, the vampire falls back in with a group of radicals known as the School of the Night. Many are unruly daemons, the creative minds of the age, including playwright Christopher Marlowe and mathematician Thomas Harriot.
  10. The Wise Man’s Fear (Part Two)
    UNABRIDGED
    By Patrick Rothfuss, narrated by Rupert Degas

Do you have something to add to this post? Please leave a comment