Laura Spinney Audiobooks

Proto follows a single ancient language as it spread across half the world

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

580 listener ratings

Who is Laura Spinney?

Laura Spinney, born in 1971, is a British science journalist, novelist and non-fiction writer – a combination that gives her prose the discipline of the newsroom and the instincts of a storyteller. She is best known for Pale Rider, her 2017 account of the 1918 influenza pandemic, a subject that demanded exactly that blend of rigour and narrative nerve.

The grounding in science journalism matters. Writers who spend years translating research for general readers learn what to leave out, and Spinney’s reputation rests on making complicated material feel urgent rather than worthy. That she also writes novels only sharpens the effect.

Laura Spinney in audiobooks

Our catalogue carries Proto, and it plays to the strengths a science journalist brings to audio: clear argument, momentum, and a nose for the telling detail. Her double life as novelist and journalist is the promise here – material organised with a storyteller’s instincts rather than a lecturer’s, which is precisely what keeps a listener pressing play. Non-fiction of this kind works particularly well in audiobook form for UK listeners because it converts dead time – the commute, the washing-up – into something that genuinely stretches the mind. Spinney belongs to the small band of science writers worth trusting with your headphones.