Tom Jones Audiobooks

Over the Top and Back: a life in entertainment, read by Jonathan Pryce

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

1,001 listener ratings

Who is Tom Jones?

Memoir written from inside the entertainment industry can go two ways: score-settling or storytelling. Over the Top and Back, the title bringing Tom Jones into our catalogue, is shelved across arts and entertainment alongside biography, and it runs twelve hours and twenty-six minutes, which is the length of a proper life story rather than a promotional exercise.

The scale of the listener response is the other clue worth noting. Very few memoirs gather a four-figure body of reviews, and the ones that do tend to be the ones people finish and then talk about afterwards.

On the author we stick to the work; the memoir is where that account properly belongs.

Tom Jones in audiobooks

The audiobook is read not by the author but by Jonathan Pryce, an interpretive choice rather than a documentary one, and it lends the narration a shaped, performed quality that suits a life told as a story.

Listeners have settled at 4.4 across more than a thousand reviews, a genuinely large sample by memoir standards and a reliable signal rather than an early flicker.

Twelve and a half hours makes this a companion for a run of commutes. If you enjoy show business memoirs with a long view, begin here; the audiobook is listed below.