World War Z

World War Z is an oral history of a zombie war, told after it’s over. An interviewer travels the world collecting first-hand accounts from survivors: soldiers, doctors, government officials and ordinary people. It begins in China with the first outbreak, then follows the war through panic, collapse and the long fight back. Every chapter is its own interview, and together they build a picture of the whole conflict.

That structure is why I’d choose the audiobook. Reading a transcript of these interviews would lose a lot. Hearing each survivor in their own voice, with accents and emotion, is what makes it feel like a documentary. The Complete Edition is a full-cast recording with around 40 voices, and Max Brooks himself plays the interviewer who links the stories. The cast includes Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, Martin Scorsese, Alfred Molina, Simon Pegg, Nathan Fillion, Common and Frank Darabont, and it’s the casting that makes each survivor believable.

It felt more real to me than almost any audiobook I’ve listened to, and the casual way people describe terrible things is what makes it so creepy.

There are a few versions of this audiobook, so here is the one I recommend: World War Z: The Complete Edition (the Movie Tie-In Edition). It combines the original abridged recording, which won an Audie Award for Best Multi-Voiced Performance, with about five hours of new, previously unrecorded episodes. Audible still lists it as abridged, because the chapters carried over from the original keep their edits, but the new episodes are unabridged and it runs 12 hours and 9 minutes.

Because it’s episodic, it’s easy to listen in short sessions. You can pause between interviews without losing the thread, and there’s no single hero to keep track of. If you only know the movie, expect something very different: this is a series of interviews, not one story.

An interesting fact: Max Brooks is the son of comedy legend Mel Brooks, which may explain how so many stars came to lend their voices to this audiobook.

Want more? See our list of the best audiobooks narrated by a full cast and the best post-apocalyptic audiobooks.