Cat Sebastian Audiobooks

After Hours at Dooryard Books: a tender queer romance set among the shelves

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

609 listener ratings

Who is Cat Sebastian?

A bookshop after closing time is a small, warm, faintly conspiratorial place, and that is the setting Cat Sebastian chooses for After Hours at Dooryard Books. The title is a promise of a particular kind of story: intimate, low on spectacle, high on the pleasure of two people being left alone together.

The writing sits at the tender end of contemporary queer romance. Conflict comes from character rather than contrivance, the humour is dry, and the emotional stakes are the ordinary enormous ones of trusting somebody with the truth about yourself.

Readers who prize atmosphere will find plenty of it. The book understands that a romance is partly a place, and it builds one you would happily linger in long after the plot has resolved.

Cat Sebastian in audiobooks

Joel Leslie takes the narration, a performer with a considerable following in queer romance audio, and the nine-hour runtime keeps the story at a companionable single-weekend length.

Hundreds of listeners have rated it highly, which makes it a confident recommendation rather than a gamble. It stands alone with no series to catch up on, so it doubles as an ideal introduction to this author’s voice. The audiobook is below, and the shelves are open.