Audiobooks For January 2026 Onwards

Surface Detail

Iain M Banks

“Surface Detail” is a thought-provoking science fiction novel set in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, exploring themes of digital afterlives, morality, and the nature of justice. The narrative follows several main characters, including Lededje Y’breq, a chattel slave seeking revenge against her murderer, Joiler Veppers, an industrialist with a lust for power. The plot intertwines their stories with a larger conflict known as the “War in Heaven,” a simulated war game that will determine the fate of these digital hells. As the war escalates, the lines between virtual and real worlds blur, leading to significant consequences for all involved.

Guards Guards

Terry Pratchett

This is where the dragons went. They lie… not dead, not asleep, but… dormant. And although the space they occupy isn’t like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. They could put you in mind of a can of sardines, if you thought sardines were huge and scaly. And presumably, somewhere, there’s a key…

The Wyrd Sisters

Terry Pratchett

Wyrd Sisters features three witches: Granny Weatherwax; Nanny Ogg, matriarch of a large tribe of Oggs, who owns the most evil cat in the world (Greebo); and Magrat Garlick, the junior witch, who firmly believes in occult jewellery, covens and bubbling cauldrons, much to the annoyance of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg.

King Verence I of Lancre is murdered by his cousin, Duke Felmet, and the King’s crown and a baby are given by an escaping servant to the three witches. The witches hand the crown and the child to a troupe of traveling actors, acknowledging that destiny will eventually take its course and the baby – Tomjon – will grow up to defeat Duke Felmet.

However, the kingdom is angry and doesn’t want to wait 15 years so the witches move the kingdom forward in time. Meanwhile, the duke has decided to get a play written and performed that is favourable to him so he sends the jester to Ankh-Morpork to recruit the same travelling (now stationary) company that Tomjon is in.

The only problem is that Tomjon does not want to be king. Luckily, the jester turns out to be his brother and he becomes king instead.

Pyramids

Terry Pratchett

Being trained by the Assassin’s Guild in Ankh-Morpork did not fit Teppic for the task assigned to him by fate. He inherited the throne of the desert kingdom of Djelibeybi rather earlier than he expected (his father wasn’t too happy about it either), but that was only the beginning of his problems…

The Great When

Alan Moore

The Great When argues through the paradigm of emerging killers that the British psyche had been severely disturbed as a consequence of the Blitz, making England’s future entirely uncertain. It observes that post-war Britain’s treatment of the poor was sure to improve after so many were deployed in its defence. Moore uses the Great When to emphasise symbolism, explaining, “If you destroy the ideals that are supporting something, the physical thing itself will eventually wane and die”.

The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital stumbles Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?

Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings. But this other, magical London must remain a secret: if Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks repercussions, such as his body being turned inside out (or worse).

So begins a journey delving deep into the city’s occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers – some from legend, some all too real, and all with plans of their own. Soon Dennis finds himself at the centre of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons forever…

Witchstone

Henry H. Neff

An unforgettable, high-stakes, laugh-out-loud funny novel, The Witchstone blends the merciless humor of The Good Place with the spellbinding fantasy of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

Meet Laszlo, eight-hundred-year-old demon and Hell’s least productive Curse Keeper. From his office beneath Midtown, he oversees the Drakeford Curse, which involves a pathetic family upstate and a mysterious black monolith. It’s a sexy enough assignment–colonial origins, mutating victims, et cetera–but Laszlo has no interest in maximizing the curse’s potential; he’d rather sunbathe in Ibiza, quaff martinis, and hustle the hustlers on Manhattan’s subway. Unfortunately, his division has new management, and Laszlo’s ratings are so abysmal that he’s given six days to shape up or he’ll be melted down and returned to the Primordial Ooze.

KATABASIS

R.F. Kuang

Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.

The Stardust Grail

Yume Kitasei

Maya Hoshimoto was once the best art thief in the galaxy. For ten years, she returned stolen artifacts to alien civilizations—until a disastrous job forced her into hiding. Now she just wants to enjoy a quiet life as a graduate student of anthropology, but she’s haunted by persistent and disturbing visions of the future.

Then an old friend comes to her with a job she can’t refuse: find a powerful object that could save an alien species from extinction. Except no one has seen it in living memory, and they aren’t the only ones hunting for it.

Maya sets out on a breakneck quest through a universe teeming with strange life and ancient ruins. But the farther she goes, the more her visions cast a dark shadow over her team of friends new and old. Someone will betray her along the way. Worse yet, in choosing to save one species, she may condemn humanity and Earth itself.

Garth Marenghi’s Terrortome

Matthew Holness

When horror writer Nick Steen gets sucked into a cursed typewriter by the terrifying Type-Face, Dark Lord of the Prolix, the hellish visions inside his head are unleashed for real. Forced to fight his escaping imagination – now leaking out of his own brain – Nick must defend the town of Stalkford from his own fictional horrors, including avascular-necrosis-obsessed serial killer Nelson Strain and Nick’s dreaded throppleganger, the Dark Third.

Can he and Roz, his frequently incorrect female editor, hunt down these incarnate denizens of Nick’s rampaging imaginata before they destroy Stalkford, outer Stalkford and possibly slightly further?

From the twisted genius of horror master Garth Marenghi – Frighternerman, Darkscribe, Doomsage (plus Man-Shee) – come three dark tales from his long-lost multi-volume epic: TerrorTome.

Can a brain leak?
(Yes, it can)

No Mans Land – Batman

Greg Rucka

GOTHAM CITY: a dark, twisted re?ection of urban America. Overcrowded, overbuilt, and overshadowed by a continuous air of menace, this gothic nightmare is a breeding ground for the depraved, the indifferent, and the criminally insane. It’s also the object of one man’s obsession. Witness to the brutal murder of his parents, Bruce Wayne has dedicated his life to protecting this city, taking a form to inspire hope in the innocent…and fear in the guilty. He is the masked vigilante known as the Batman.

Now the battlefield has changed. Leveled by a massive earthquake that left thousands dead and millions more wounded, Gotham City has been transformed into a lawless wilderness — a No Man’s Land — where the survivors are turning against one another, and where the city’s protectors are torn by a crisis that may consume them all.