Chris Wraight Audiobooks

Ashes of the Imperium: Horus Heresy war fiction at galactic scale

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

338 listener ratings

Who is Chris Wraight?

Shared-universe fiction asks something unusual of a writer: to work inside a setting built by many hands and still sound like nobody else. Chris Wraight does that in the Warhammer 40,000 setting, where Ashes of the Imperium takes its place in the vast Horus Heresy sequence.

The mode is military science fiction with the volume turned up, though our catalogue also tags it as fantasy, and that is not simply an error. This is a universe where the machinery of science fiction runs on something closer to myth, and the writing takes both halves seriously.

The pleasure of the sub-genre at its best is interiority. The battles are there, at scale, but so is the question of what enormous events do to the people caught inside them, and that is what lifts tie-in fiction into something worth returning to.

Chris Wraight in audiobooks

Ashes of the Imperium sits within The Horus Heresy: The Scouring, and it is worth knowing that going in. The Heresy is an enormous, long-running sequence, and this is a chapter of it rather than a standalone door.

Jonathan Keeble narrates, with a voice that suits the scale of the thing, and fifteen and a half hours of it makes for a proper campaign of a listen. The scores are solid across a substantial body of listeners, which for tie-in fiction is a meaningful signal.

Anyone already inside the Heresy will know where this fits. Newcomers are better served starting at the beginning of that sequence and arriving here later. Explore the audiobooks below.