Sarah A. Denzil Audiobooks

Yorkshire is the quiet co-author of Sarah A. Denzil’s fiction: the moors, the small towns, the rivers that flood without warning. She lives there, and her novels tend to take an unremarkable life and apply pressure to it until something gives.

She came to suspense by way of young adult fiction, which she still writes as Sarah Dalton, and found her audience with Silent Child, the story of a mother whose drowned son walks back out of the woods ten years later. It sold in the hundreds of thousands, topped the charts in Britain, America and Australia, and established the register she has worked in ever since: domestic, interior, unsentimental about families.

Denzil is a Wall Street Journal bestseller who built her readership largely on her own terms rather than through a single big publisher, and it shows in the writing. The books are lean, they trust the listener, and they are far more curious about why a person lies than about how a detective proves it.

Whoever casts Denzil’s audiobooks deserves a raise. The Devoted Wife, the best rated of her titles with us and the one you can start on today, is read by Sheridan Smith, who can turn a pleasant sentence sour in the space of a comma. It is the natural first listen.

Behind it sits a run of productions arriving in stages: We Play Games read by Billie Piper, Secret Sister by Jessica Gunning, The Woman in Coach D by Katie Clarkson-Hill and Behind a Locked Door by Robyn Addison. None of them depends on the others, so there is no reading order to fret about; choose by narrator, or by premise.

Have a look at what is on the shelf below, and come back for the rest as they land.