Chris Broad Audiobooks

Abroad in Japan: a travel account read in the author's own voice

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

6 listener ratings

Who is Chris Broad?

Travel writing declares itself in a title, and Abroad in Japan declares plenty: an outsider’s account of a country, written from inside it. That is the whole of what our catalogue can tell you about Chris Broad, and it is honestly enough to know whether the book is for you.

The signal worth noticing is the narrator credit. Broad reads the book personally, which places it in the tradition of travel writing as first-person testimony rather than guidebook. Self-narrated travel tends to be conversational, funny about the writer’s own blunders, and interested in the ordinary texture of a place rather than its postcard views.

Eight hours is a well-judged length for the form. Long enough to build a picture of somewhere properly, short enough to hold together as a single account.

Chris Broad in audiobooks

Abroad in Japan is the place to start, and there is an advantage in its self-contained shape: no reading order to negotiate, no series to catch up on.

The reading is Broad’s own, and that matters more in travel than in most genres. A writer describing a place at first hand brings emphases and hesitations that a hired voice, however skilled, has to reconstruct from the page.

It suits commutes and long walks particularly well, being episodic by nature and easy to pick up mid-chapter. Have a look at what is waiting below.