Clara’s Verdict
Marian Keyes reading her own work is the audiobook equivalent of hearing a comedian deliver their own material. Nobody else gets the timing quite right. My Favourite Mistake – a Sunday Times Number One bestseller – reunites us with Anna Walsh from Is Anybody Out There?, now approaching fifty and arriving back in Ireland trailing the wreckage of a New York career and a failed relationship. It is funny, it is occasionally bleak, and it is written with the forensic emotional intelligence that has made Keyes one of Britain’s most reliably excellent popular novelists. At fifteen and a half hours, it earns its length.
About the audiobook
Published by Penguin Audio in April 2024, this novel follows high-flying PR Anna Walsh as she abandons New York and comes home to Dublin, ostensibly for a fresh start. Her family has rather different theories – involving the words “midlife crisis” – and they are not entirely wrong. Back in Ireland, Anna cannot escape the past: the best friend she abandoned without adequate explanation, the old flame she failed to extinguish properly, the accumulated mistakes she had been successfully ignoring from three thousand miles away. But the novel’s central gamble is Keyes’s suggestion that mistakes themselves might be a kind of compass – that the wrong turns, revisited honestly, might point towards something better.
It is the second Anna Walsh novel, though Keyes writes it to function as a standalone. The Dublin social world is rendered with the affectionate precision she always brings to her setting, and the emotional territory – the specific exhaustion of a woman who has spent decades performing competence – is handled with unusual directness.
The narration
Keyes narrating her own work is an unconventional decision, but it pays off handsomely. She reads with warmth and a light Dublin cadence that gives the comic passages genuine momentum – the jokes land because she knows they’re jokes, and she trusts listeners to follow her. Her delivery of Anna’s interior monologue is particularly strong: the voice is intimate without becoming confessional, and the self-deprecating comedy never tips into self-pity. At 15 hours and 35 minutes, there are passages where a professional audiobook narrator might have achieved more range in supporting characters, but the compensating authenticity is worth the trade.
What readers say
Rated 4.3 out of 5 stars from 14 reviews. Reactions are genuinely mixed, which makes this a more interesting case than a straight success story. Devoted fans of Anna Walsh – some of whom have “read Is Anybody Out There? countless times” – find this a worthy, emotional continuation. One UK listener was “so pleased” she returned to Anna’s story immediately after finishing the first book. Others, self-described long-term Keyes devotees, found this the first of her novels they did not finish – one noting it felt “sluggish” compared to her earlier work. The consensus appears to be that readers who loved Anna in the first novel will find this genuinely satisfying; those coming cold to Keyes may find earlier titles a better entry point.
Who should listen?
For existing Marian Keyes readers, particularly anyone who loved Is Anybody Out There?, this is straightforwardly essential. It is also well suited to listeners who appreciate emotionally intelligent women’s fiction that doesn’t flinch from depicting the messiness of middle age – the romantic comedy machinery is present, but the emotional realism is given equal weight. If you’re new to Keyes, starting with the first Anna Walsh novel first is probably wise, though Keyes has written this to work as a standalone.
Listen to My Favourite Mistake on Audible UK: Get it on Audible.
