Douglas Adams Audiobooks

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently: comic science fiction at its peak

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★ 4.6/5 average

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Who is Douglas Adams?

He began, famously, lying drunk in a field near Innsbruck with a copy of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Europe, and the idea he had there became a radio series, a novel, a television programme, a film and a permanent fixture of the English language. Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge in 1952, read English at St John’s, wrote for Monty Python and Doctor Who, and then spent the rest of a short life being funnier about the universe than anyone had previously managed.

The Hitchhiker sequence grew into what he cheerfully described as a trilogy in five parts. Beside it he wrote two Dirk Gently novels and Last Chance to See, a travel book about endangered species that is quietly the most humane thing he ever did.

He was a spectacular procrastinator, a technology enthusiast decades ahead of the crowd, and he died in California in 2001 at forty-nine. The jokes have not aged a day.

Douglas Adams in audiobooks

Two of his best-loved productions live with us, and both are full-cast performances rather than straight readings. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy runs just under four hours as an ensemble piece, and listeners have parked it a whisker below five stars. Arthur Dent’s dressing gown, the Vogon poetry, the whale: all of it lands harder with a cast and sound design than it ever could read solo.

The companion is Dirk Gently: Two BBC Radio Full-Cast Dramas, in which Harry Enfield plays the holistic detective across dramatisations of both novels, with Olivia Colman and Billy Boyd among the voices. Nearly seven hours of interconnectedness, missing cats and a four-billion-year-old mystery.

Start with the Hitchhiker if you are new to him, then let Dirk explain why that was never a coincidence. Everything we hold is listed below.