Josh Silver Audiobooks

Fruit Fly and the HappyHead duology: British fiction about care and control

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★ 4.5/5 average

729 listener ratings

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LGBTQ+

Who is Josh Silver?

Before the books there were two other lives. Josh Silver, born in 1989, worked first as an actor and then as a mental health nurse, and the second of those jobs runs visibly through everything he has published since.

His debut, HappyHead, opened a young adult duology set in a wellness retreat where teenagers are optimised into happiness. It was shortlisted for the 2024 YA Book Prize, nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Writing and snapped up for the screen by the actor Taron Egerton before publication. Dead Happy completed the pair in 2024, and TraumaLand, a standalone psychological thriller, followed in 2025.

In 2026 he crossed into adult fiction with Fruit Fly, named by the BBC among its must-reads of the year. The move surprised nobody who had been reading him closely. Silver writes about institutions that claim to be helping, about young men in trouble, and about the queasy distance between care and control, and he does it with a thriller writer’s grip.

Josh Silver in audiobooks

Meet him through Fruit Fly, which is a bracing introduction by any measure. A wealthy novelist, stalled and bored, fixes on a young gay addict and sex worker as raw material for the book that will rescue his career. The result is a study of extraction dressed as a literary thriller.

Camilla Rockley narrates the whole of it, and the performance has been rated highly by a large body of listeners, which for an adult debut says something about both the writing and the reading. She holds the novel’s queasy intimacy without ever pushing at it.

Come to it expecting discomfort rather than comfort, and give it the attention it asks of you. Anyone who found Silver through his young adult work will recognise the preoccupations here, sharpened considerably. The audiobooks below will show you what else of his has reached us.