Russell Myers Audiobooks

William and Catherine: a dual biography of a marriage conducted in full public view

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

229 listener ratings

Who is Russell Myers?

Royal biography is a crowded shelf, and what separates one attempt from the next is usually a question of distance: how close the writer is willing to get, and how much is left as reported rather than imagined. William & Catherine arrives filed under biography and memoir, classics and heritage, and politics and society, which is a useful triangulation of everything a book about this particular pair has to handle.

Russell Myers narrates in person, an increasingly common arrangement for reported non-fiction and a sensible one. The emphasis falls where the writer intended it, and there is no gap between the tone of the sentence and the tone of the voice reading it aloud.

Russell Myers in audiobooks

Just under eleven hours gives the material room to breathe, which a dual portrait needs. Two lives, two families and a shared institution do not compress neatly into a single sitting, and the running time points to a proper chronological account rather than a highlights reel.

Reception has been warm, an average of 4.4 drawn from a couple of hundred ratings, which is a respectable sample by the standards of recent non-fiction. For anyone coming to Myers for the first time, this is the natural entry point.

It will suit listeners who follow the modern monarchy as an unfolding story rather than a sequence of photographs, and anyone who enjoys biography written with a reporter’s appetite for detail. Availability and running time are set out underneath.