Michael Wood Audiobooks

Michael Wood, born in Manchester in 1948, is an English historian and broadcaster who has been making history programmes since the late 1970s. In Search of the Dark Ages made his name; The Story of England, The Story of India, The Story of China and In Search of Shakespeare followed, and he has been Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester since 2013.

His method has barely changed in fifty years, which is precisely why it still works. He goes to the place. He reads the local record, talks to the people living on the ground he is describing, and lets landscape and document argue with one another on camera. The result is history that feels walked rather than compiled.

One caution for anyone browsing, because the name is shared. The crime thrillers filed on this page belong to a different Michael Wood, the British novelist behind the DCI Matilda Darke series, and not to the historian described above.

The Story of China is the anchor here and the most reviewed title on the page: four thousand years told through dynasties, poets, peasants and family archives, and grounded in the time Wood spent filming across the country. He reads it himself, all twenty-three hours of it, and the voice is so bound up with the television series that the audiobook feels like its natural extension.

The crime novels sitting alongside it come from his namesake. Let the Dead Sleep follows a journalist reopening her sister’s twenty-five-year-old murder and is read by Gemma Whelan; Maybe Tomorrow, read by Annabel Scholey, is a standalone psychological thriller that began life as an Audible Original.

If you came for the history, start with The Story of China. Everything filed under the name is listed below.