Clara’s Verdict
I finished By Your Side on a Sunday afternoon walk along the South Bank — which is, in retrospect, exactly the right setting for a novel about unexpected journeys and the strangers who become necessary. Ruth Jones, the BAFTA-winning co-creator of Gavin and Stacey, narrates her own book, and that decision matters more than you might expect. This is a story about warmth, and Jones’s voice carries it in a way that a hired narrator simply could not replicate.
There is a particular kind of British novel — and I mean this as a compliment — that builds its emotional architecture out of very ordinary lives made extraordinary by circumstance. By Your Side belongs to this tradition. A council worker’s final case. A hearse as transport. A remote Scottish island. What sounds like the set-up for a quirky comedy turns out to be something considerably more tender.
About the Audiobook
Linda Standish has spent thirty-three years as a friend to the friendless at her local council’s Unclaimed Heirs Unit, a job that involves tracing relatives of people who die without known family. Before she retires, she takes on one last case: Levi Norman, a Welshman who spent five years before his death on a remote Scottish island called Storrich. What brought him there? Who, if anyone, did he leave behind?
The conceit — that Linda must travel by hearse, accompanied by her arch nemesis, to this distant community — has a faintly absurdist quality that Jones uses to comic effect without letting it overwhelm the story’s deeper currents. The island’s residents, rendered with the kind of specificity that marks Jones’s writing at its best, are not quirky local colour but fully inhabited people with their own secrets and losses. Linda, meanwhile, undergoes the quieter transformation of someone who has spent a career attending to others finally attending to herself.
Published by Transworld Digital in May 2025, By Your Side is Jones’s follow-up to Love Untold and arrives trailing both a Sunday Times bestseller pedigree and a Richard and Judy Book Club endorsement.
The Narration
Ruth Jones reading her own work is not a gimmick but a genuine artistic choice. She has lived with these characters long enough to understand exactly where the comedy tips into pathos, and her timing — honed by years in front of camera — is impeccable. The Welsh voices are handled with an authenticity that would be difficult to fake, and Linda’s internal monologue gains a confessional quality when delivered in Jones’s own voice. At just under eleven hours, this is a production that moves at a confident pace: neither rushed nor padded.
What Readers Say
The Audible UK rating sits at 4.7 across three early reviews, all of them enthusiastic. The review that stopped me came from Ms. A. Sheppard, who read the book while going through chemotherapy: « I am not someone who can easily read a book — my mind travels too much — but this book I was engaged all the way through. » Katie called it « poignant, gentle yet powerful » and noted that it prompted her to buy the rest of Jones’s backlist. The reviewer signing off as « What’s occurring? » — a Gavin and Stacey reference that made me smile — described it as « touching, amusing, beautifully written. » Kay ZI called it « the best of Ruth’s books to date. » These are not the reviews of people being polite.
Who Should Listen?
For anyone who reads for the pleasure of inhabiting a fully realised world and then reluctantly leaving it, By Your Side delivers. It is warm without being saccharine, funny without undercutting its emotion, and in Linda Standish it gives us a heroine whose quiet decency feels genuinely hard-won. It is particularly well suited to long walks, weekend listening, or any occasion when you want to feel rather than simply think. Listen on Audible UK for Ruth Jones’s own performance.
