Clara’s Verdict
Mad Mabel won Audiobook of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, and having now spent nine hours and twenty-four minutes with it I understand why the audio edition in particular was singled out. Sally Hepworth has written a first-person account by an eighty-one-year-old woman with a body count behind her, and the entire book depends on how that voice sounds in your ear. Get it wrong and the result is either grotesque or twee. This recording gets it right from the first paragraph.
Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is eighty-one, lives quietly in an ordinary suburb, and is by her own cheerful admission a curmudgeon who minds everybody else’s business. What her neighbours do not know is that people in Elsie’s life have a long and strange history of coming to a foul end. Hepworth’s central observation is a genuinely clever one, and she states it plainly on the listing: when it comes to murder, nobody ever suspects little girls or old ladies. Elsie has been both.
About the Audiobook
The plot begins when an elderly neighbour is found dead and Elsie’s carefully buried past starts working its way to the surface. As a teenager she was convicted of murder, the youngest Australian in history to be convicted of it, and the machinery that drags this back into public view is a podcast interview, which is a very contemporary device deployed with rather more wit than usual. Elsie tells her own childhood story into a microphone, and Hepworth lets us work out gradually how much of it we ought to believe.
What surprised me is how funny the book is, and how the humour never neutralises the darkness underneath it. The publisher positions it as quirky and charming, with comparisons drawn to My Friends by Fredrik Backman, The Wedding People and The Correspondent, and that placement is accurate about the tone while rather underselling the sharpness. Harlan Coben called it funny, twisty and suspenseful. Jane Harper, who knows this territory as well as anyone writing, called it a twisty page-turning triumph, packed with wit, warmth, nuance and mystery.
It was an instant New York Times bestseller and a number one bestseller in Australia. Macmillan released the audiobook on 9 July 2026 and it is one of the titles moving fastest in the Audible UK charts at the moment. No series, no prerequisites, and the line printed on the listing tells you the theme without spoiling a thing: you can change your name, but you cannot change your past.
The Narration
Hannah Fredrickson has about the hardest assignment a narrator can be handed, and she solves it with one very good decision, which is to play Elsie’s age without playing frailty. Her Elsie sounds eighty-one. The pacing is unhurried, the breath is shorter, the consonants carry that slight precision older speakers often retain. What she does not do is make her feeble, and the difference is everything, because Elsie’s menace depends entirely on her being in complete command of herself.
The comic timing is the second achievement. Elsie’s observations about her neighbours are funny on the page and funnier in performance, and Fredrickson knows exactly when to leave a beat hanging and when to run straight through one. The podcast interview sections are especially well handled: she gives Elsie a slightly different public voice for the recording, more careful and more constructed, and the small gap between that voice and the private narration is where all the unreliability lives.
Her young Elsie, in the childhood sections, is a separate and equally successful piece of work. She does not do a child’s voice, which would have been the lazy option. She keeps the same intelligence and strips away the accumulated armour, a far more sophisticated approach that makes the two timelines feel like one continuous person rather than two characters sharing a name. The award this recording won was thoroughly deserved.
What Readers Say
More than 30,000 people have rated this already and they have settled on 4.6, which is emphatic for a book barely out, and the enthusiasm in the written reviews runs close to evangelical. Several readers describe finishing it inside a day or two, and one reports having bought copies as gifts for friends who then enjoyed it just as much.
Not quite was I was expecting from the blurb on the back of the book. But finished it in two days and came away loving Mabel and all the characters in the book.
ChrisseyB’s warning about the blurb is worth heeding, and she is not the only reader to raise it. This is not quite the gentle cosy that the packaging implies. She also mentioned a couple of shock moments that made her shout out loud, adding that this was not great at 5am this morning, which will be painfully familiar to anyone who listens in the early hours before the household is awake.
The most analytically useful review comes from a reader writing as Always Need More Books, who described Elsie at 81 as grumpy and a little world weary, and then admitted to wondering how she would feel about liking a convicted murderer once she knew the details. That is the book’s real gamble and the thing to watch for as you listen. Another reviewer simply called it the best she had read in a long time, which is not analysis but does capture the general temperature of the response.
Who Should Listen?
Book clubs are going to have a very good time with this one, because the central moral question does not resolve into a comfortable answer and people will disagree about Elsie in genuinely interesting ways. It also suits anyone who has drifted away from crime fiction on the grounds that the protagonists had all started to feel the same. An eighty-one-year-old unreliable narrator is a real change of air.
The tonal mix will not work for everybody. Hepworth asks you to find a murderer charming and then to keep finding her charming after you know considerably more, and readers who want moral clarity in their crime fiction will resist that bargain. Anyone arriving for a cosy mystery on the strength of the packaging should recalibrate, since the childhood sections in particular go to some bleak places. And if the podcast-as-framing-device has begun to grate on you, be aware that here it structures a substantial portion of the book rather than appearing as a decorative flourish.
