Clara’s Verdict
Leeanne Slade has built a loyal readership through books that do something deceptively difficult: romance that’s funny and warm without sacrificing emotional honesty. The Return of Ruby Darling is an Audible Original narrated by Eleanor Tomlinson – star of Poldark and One Day – and the match between voice and material is perfect. This is a love story about a travel influencer whose life is falling apart; but more interestingly, it’s about the gap between the life you perform and the life you’re actually living, which gives it a layer of contemporary relevance that lifts it above the standard friends-to-lovers formula.
Audible rating: 5.0/5 (3 ratings)
About the Audiobook
Ruby Darling’s engagement has ended, her Instagram career as a travel influencer is collapsing, and she’s convinced the universe has it in for her. In a bid to turn things around, she travels to New Zealand to find her long-lost father, bringing along her estranged best friend Nate. As they navigate the landscape and the accumulated history between them, a friendship rekindles into something more – complicated by family secrets, old hurts, and Ruby’s catastrophically bad relationship with her own decisions.
Slade is sharp on the performative dishonesty of social media – Ruby’s influencer identity is part of the problem she’s fleeing, not an incidental detail – and she uses New Zealand’s extraordinary landscapes as both backdrop and counterpoint to Ruby’s self-constructed image. The comedy is real and often very sharp; so is the emotional vulnerability when it arrives. The friends-to-lovers arc is handled with enough care to make the resolution feel earned rather than inevitable from chapter one.
The Narration
Eleanor Tomlinson is an exceptional narrator for this material. She brings Ruby’s chaotic energy and underlying fragility with genuine conviction – this is not celebrity narration in the detached, slightly over-articulated mode that often marks the form. Tomlinson clearly connects with the character, and her comic timing is excellent: the scenes of Ruby’s spectacular bad luck land as they should. At just under ten hours, the runtime is comfortable, and Tomlinson’s voice makes the New Zealand sequences feel genuinely cinematic. This is one of those audiobooks where the narration is, arguably, the best version of the text.
What Readers Say
UK listeners gave this a perfect 5.0/5 across three ratings. One wrote: “Fantastic! I felt like I was in New Zealand with them.” Another noted: “I actually loved this book – an easy to read romantic book, also goes into the fake lonely world of Instagram stars.” That second reviewer added a detail that says something about the book’s quality: “This is one of the books that you are sad when you finish because you miss the characters.” That sense of loss at the end is, I think, the highest compliment you can give a piece of romantic fiction.
Who Should Listen?
Fans of Leeanne Slade’s other work – The Rebound, Told You So, The Glitch – will want this immediately. More broadly, readers who enjoy contemporary romance with comedy and genuine emotional stakes will find this a satisfying listen. Particularly well-suited to listeners who’ve grown frustrated by social media’s manufactured perfection and want fiction that engages with that honestly rather than glamorising it. Eleanor Tomlinson’s fan base will also find this a natural choice. As an Audible Original, it’s an exclusive listen that won’t be found elsewhere.
Listen to The Return of Ruby Darling on Audible UK – an exclusive Audible Original narrated by Eleanor Tomlinson.
