Weekend Roadtrip Listens For Everybody

Family-bond over this favorite — 5 hours There are few characters in literature more iconic than J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Now, actress Lily Collins (The Blind Side, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones) brings new, youthful energy to Peter’s magical adventures.

Kid-friendly fun for you, too — 3 hours Golden Globe nominee Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation, Girl with a Pearl Earring) brings a palpable sense of joy and exuberance to her performance of Lewis Carroll’s enduring classic. The young and imaginative Alice grows weary of her storybook, one “without pictures or conversations,” and follows a hasty hare underground — to come face to face with a host of strange and fantastic characters.

Sweet YA favorite for any age — 9 hours Set over the course of one school year, in 1986, this is the story of two star-crossed misfits — smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you’ll remember your own first love — and just how hard it pulled you under.

Adults and teens will be riveted — 12 hours Ten years ago, Calamity came. It was a burst in the sky that gave ordinary men and women extraordinary powers. The awed public started calling them Epics. But Epics are no friend of man. With incredible gifts came the desire to rule. And to rule man you must crush his wills. Nobody fights the Epics … nobody but the Reckoners. A shadowy group of ordinary humans, they spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them. And David wants in. He wants Steelheart — the Epic who is said to be invincible. The Epic who killed David’s father.

Perfect for laying by the pool — 9.5 hours Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it’s a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods, and is soon certain that Jane Neal died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter.

Lose yourself in a seaside mystery — 15.5 hours Some people stay all summer long on the idyllic island of Belle Isle, North Carolina. Some people come only for the weekends — and it’s something they look forward to all week long. When Riley Griggs is waiting for her husband to arrive at the ferry one Friday afternoon, she is instead served with papers informing her that her island home is being foreclosed. To make matters worse, her husband is nowhere to be found.

It's my ideal trifecta: A memoir by a writer's writer, narrated by the author, and concerning the Pacific Ocean. This just won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography, but I've been flirting with listening to it for months. I grew up along Southern California's coast, even went to a high school with a surf team, but I never learned to surf — in fact, I was quite terrified of the idea. The New Yorker's William Finnegan wrote (and tells) a gorgeous paean to my home ocean, to the follies of feckless youth, and to the adventure of becoming a world-traveling journalist. –Erin, Audible Range Managing Editor

Inspiring veteran’s true story — 14 hours Seabiscuit was a runaway success, and Hillenbrand’s done it again with another true-life account about beating unbelievable odds. On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared…

The novel that started it all. Here began the journey through thousands of pages (and dozens of TV hours) of betrayal, bloodshed, Machiavellian intrigue, and, of course, dragons. What an introduction A Game of Thrones gives its dragons, too: suckling a naked Daenerys who has emerged unscathed from the fire that hatched them. It leaves little doubt that George R. R. Martin knows dragons are cool, and knows how to show them off.