MJ Duncan Audiobooks

Something in the Water: a long, slow-burning queer romance

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

1 listener rating

Who is MJ Duncan?

Twelve and a half hours is a generous allowance for a romance, and it tells you something about how MJ Duncan works. Stories at this length are not built on a single misunderstanding cleared up in the final chapter; they make room for a relationship to be established, tested and rebuilt, with the ordinary business of two lives running alongside it.

Our catalogue files Something in the Water under romance and LGBTQ+, placing it in one of the most reader-driven corners of the genre, where audiences are vocal, loyal and quick to say when a story has been hurried. The title itself keeps its promise deliberately vague, borrowing an idiom about a place that seems to produce the same thing in everyone who lives there. The writing is left to supply the rest.

MJ Duncan in audiobooks

Abby Craden takes the narration, and a work of this length asks a particular kind of stamina from a reader: consistency of character across a dozen hours, so that the voices met in the first hour still sound like themselves in the last.

This is a scheduled arrival rather than something already on the shelf, and ratings have barely started, which is normal at this stage and not worth reading anything into either way.

Where to begin is straightforward, since this is where Duncan enters our shelves. Anyone who prefers a romance with room to breathe, and who has grown tired of stories resolving before they have properly started, should find the running time an argument in its favour rather than an obstacle. The listing below will tell you where things stand.