Katie Kirby Audiobooks

Katie Kirby began not in children’s publishing but in advertising, having taken a degree in advertising and marketing and spent several years inside London media agencies. Her breakthrough came from a blog, Hurrah for Gin, whose frank and very funny account of imperfect parenting grew into a best-selling book. She lives on the south coast of England, in Hove, and works as both writer and illustrator.

When her UK publishers spotted that her comic, confiding voice would translate beautifully for younger readers, she turned to children’s fiction and created Lottie Brooks. The diary-style series has become one of the most beloved franchises in contemporary British children’s writing, now running to eight instalments and beyond.

Kirby’s gift is comedy that never condescends: the excruciating social minefield of Year Seven, rendered with warmth, wit and a cartoonist’s eye for the telling detail. Her Lottie is anxious, funny and wholly recognisable, which is precisely why a generation of tweens has taken her to heart.

Our shelves hold two entries from the Lottie Brooks canon, both narrated by Charlie Sanderson, whose bright, expressive reading is inseparable from the audio experience. The natural place to begin is The Extremely Embarrassing Life of Lottie Brooks, the series opener and Kirby’s debut novel, which introduces our heroine and her catalogue of mortifications; it holds a 4.7 rating with early listeners.

From there, The Mega-Complicated Crushes of Lottie Brooks carries the diary forward into the tangled territory of first crushes, and it edges ahead as our highest-rated Kirby title at 4.8. Read in sequence, the two capture the everyday drama of growing up with real affection and a great deal of laughter.

If you have a reluctant reader in the house, or simply fancy something to make the school run fly by, these Lottie Brooks audiobooks are a joy. Explore both titles below.