Clara’s Verdict
Ending a nine-book science fiction series is one of the hardest things a novelist can attempt. The expectations accumulated over thousands of pages of character development, world-building, and escalating stakes are nearly impossible to satisfy – and yet Leviathan Falls, the concluding volume of James S. A. Corey’s Hugo Award-winning Expanse series, very nearly pulls it off. Nearly. Book 9 in the series carries an extraordinary rating of 4.8 out of 5 from 28 reviews, and Jefferson Mays’s narration over nearly twenty hours maintains the standard he has set across the entire series. This is how you finish a space opera.
About the audiobook
Published by Recorded Books in November 2021, Leviathan Falls picks up in the aftermath of the Laconian Empire’s defeat. The thirteen hundred solar systems colonised through the alien Ring gates are nominally free. But the ancient intelligence that destroyed the gate builders – the entity that has haunted the later Expanse books as an incomprehensible existential threat – has woken again. In Adro, scientist Elvi Okoye leads a mission to understand what the gate builders were. Elsewhere, Colonel Aliana Tanaka hunts for Duarte’s missing daughter and the shattered emperor himself. And aboard the Rocinante, James Holden and his crew are trying to build something worth saving from the wreckage of everything that has come before.
The novel operates at an enormous scale – literally cosmic – while remaining emotionally grounded in the specific, human-scaled relationships that have defined the series from its earliest pages. Corey resolves the question of the alien threat in a way that is genuinely surprising without feeling arbitrary, and the final pages have a poignancy that readers who have spent years with this crew will find affecting.
The narration
Jefferson Mays has narrated the entire Expanse series and his work here is, if anything, the best of a consistently exceptional run. His handling of the large cast – characters the listener has been living with for potentially years – is masterful, with each voice immediately recognisable. The contrast between the vast, impersonal scale of the cosmic threat and the intimate, vulnerable quality of the character moments is something Mays manages with particular skill, giving the novel’s emotional resolution the weight it deserves. At just under twenty hours, his stamina and consistency are remarkable.
What readers say
Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars from 28 reviews. Listeners who have been with the series since the beginning are effusive. “Man, what a ride,” wrote one UK reviewer, offering a panoramic appreciation of the series’s nine-book arc. Another called it “space opera at its best” after having journeyed “through the universe with the crew of the Rocinante for about seven years.” A third described it as “an enormous leap in quality” relative to earlier volumes, praising the emotional depth the authors had found by the final book. A thoughtful four-star review noted that Duarte and Trejo were “not so well portrayed” as in earlier books, while acknowledging the novel “did the job required.” One UK listener read it in 48 hours and hadn’t read anything non-stop for that long “since the Famous Five as a kid.”
Who should listen?
Categorically not a standalone: this is the culmination of nine novels, and its emotional impact is entirely contingent on having lived through the preceding eight. For those who have, this is essential – the kind of series finale that you will think about for a long time. For anyone who hasn’t started The Expanse yet, there has never been a better reason to begin at Book 1 – knowing that the ending delivers.
Listen to Leviathan Falls (The Expanse, Book 9) on Audible UK: Get it on Audible.
