Clara’s Verdict
There is a kind of comic novelist who is funny in a way that has almost nothing to do with jokes, and Bob Mortimer has turned out to be one of them. The Long Shoe made me laugh a great deal, and I can barely point to a single gag. The humour arrives instead in the way his characters explain themselves, in the slightly wrong word chosen with total confidence, in a man describing his own catastrophe as though it were a minor inconvenience he will sort out on Tuesday. Seven hours and twenty-five minutes is a well judged length for that trick, which would fray at twelve.
What I did not expect was how straight the plot plays. Underneath the amiability there is a proper mechanism, and the turn it takes in the back half caught me out entirely. A 4.5 average from 4,686 ratings is a strong showing for a novel released in October 2025, and it is currently one of the best-selling audiobooks in the UK, which suggests a readership that has settled in for the long run rather than buying one book out of affection for the comedian.
About the Audiobook
Matt sells bathrooms, or he did. By the time we meet him he has lost the job, he is close to losing the roof over his head, and his girlfriend has gone. He is not, to his enormous credit as a character, looking for reinvention. He wants his luck to change and he wants things to go back to exactly how they were, which is a more honest ambition than most novels grant their protagonists and makes him immediately easy to be around.
Then a job appears out of nowhere, and it arrives with a free luxury apartment attached. Matt takes it, largely because he suspects the flat might be enough to tempt his girlfriend back. As events unfold it begins to occur to him that she may not have left of her own accord after all. That is as far as I will go on the plot, because a good deal of the pleasure in the second half depends on not seeing the shape of it in advance.
The press reception has been warm and faintly surprised, which is the standard response whenever a comedian turns out to be able to write. The Guardian called it “A touching story of human relationships”, the Daily Express “A delight to read”, and the Daily Telegraph gave it five stars for “A genuinely unexpected storyline”, recommending it for a plane ride or a holiday, which is exactly right about its register. Worth noting that the Observer line describing a debut “whose surrealist humour sets it apart” appears on the listing under general praise for Mortimer rather than for this book, so do not read it as a verdict on The Long Shoe itself. It stands entirely alone and requires no prior reading, though listeners who came through The Satsuma Complex and Hotel Avocado will recognise the temperature immediately.
The Narration
No narrator is credited on this listing, and that gap matters more here than it would for most novels, so I want to be honest about it rather than write around it.
Here is why it matters. One reviewer says of Mortimer’s fiction that “I can’t help but hear Bob’s voice as I read his books”, and I suspect that is close to universal among his readers. The prose has a cadence that belongs to a specific speaking voice, full of arrested rhythms, unnecessary detail delivered with great seriousness, and sentences that stop a beat later than you expect them to. A reading that catches that cadence will be superb. A reading that smooths it into standard comic-novel delivery will lose most of what makes the book distinctive, because the comedy lives in timing rather than in content.
The second demand is tonal. The Long Shoe is genial for a long stretch and then quietly stops being genial, and whoever reads it has to make that shift without announcing it. Play the later material for laughs and the threat evaporates. Play it too grimly and the earlier warmth looks like a bait and switch. Sample before you commit, and listen specifically for whether the reader is willing to leave a pause alone.
What Readers Say
That 4.5 rating is backed up by reviews which keep landing on the same two words, quirky and warm. One reader found it “Very easy book to pass time on a long train journey” and “Funny in Bob’s style but a quirky story too”, which is a perfectly fair summary of what the book sets out to be. Kath was more effusive, describing descriptions that are “whacky and hilarious” and a “Great twist to the story”.
What Bob Mortimer does exceptionally well is create characters that feel completely real, despite often finding themselves in unusual situations.
That comes from S. Hayes, a self-described big Mortimer fan who came in with high expectations, settled on four stars, and whose review headline is worth repeating in full: great characters and classic Mortimer charm, despite some plot issues. I think that is the honest position. The mechanism creaks in one or two places, particularly around how conveniently certain information reaches Matt, and the book gets away with it because you have stopped caring about plausibility and started caring about the people.
Who Should Listen?
If you have read Mortimer before, you already know whether this is for you, and it is. The voice is unchanged and the storytelling has grown noticeably more confident.
For newcomers, I would place this with anyone who wants comic fiction that is genuinely about people rather than about being clever, and who does not mind a crime plot arriving through the side door. Seven and a half hours makes it a two-journey book or a single long Sunday, and the shortish, incident-led chapters suit interrupted listening well. Readers who like their British comic novels gentle and eccentric, and who have enjoyed the noirish end of that tradition, will find the balance here about right.
I would steer away anyone who wants a tightly engineered thriller. The plot is the vehicle, not the point, and if you spend the second half auditing the logic you will enjoy yourself considerably less than the person beside you who is simply listening to a bathroom salesman describe his week. Come for the sentences and let the story happen around them.
