Clara Hayes

Clara Hayes

Clara Hayes is the founder and lead reviewer at Audio Book Spot. A lifelong listener, she has worked her way through thousands of hours of audio across every genre — epic fantasy, literary fiction, romance, thrillers, and memoir. Clara reviews with the listening experience front and center: narrator performance, pacing, production, and whether a title truly rewards the hours it asks of you. Her goal is simple — to help you spend your listening time on audiobooks you'll actually love.

The Song of Achilles Audiobook

Madeline Miller took a myth roughly three thousand years old and made it feel like fresh news. This is the Song of Achilles audiobook, from one listener to another. On audio, The Song of Achilles turns Homer’s ancient story of…

The Help Audiobook

There’s a particular unease that comes with a book everyone already has opinions about. Let me walk you through the Help audiobook. The Help has been a book-club staple, a hit film, and a lightning rod all at once, so…

Homegoing Audiobook

You begin with two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana who never meet, and by the end you have followed their bloodlines across three hundred years and seven generations. Settle in for my take on the Homegoing audiobook. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing carries…

Beneath a Scarlet Sky Audiobook

How does an eighteen-year-old who would rather chase girls and listen to Frank Sinatra records end up guiding refugees over the Alps on foot, then sliding into the passenger seat of one of the most powerful men in occupied Italy?…

The Four Winds Audiobook

Elsa Martinelli is a woman the world wrote off as plain and unlovable, right up until the Texas dust and the Great Depression demanded she become something far fiercer. Let me walk you through the Four Winds audiobook. The Four…

The Tattooist of Auschwitz Audiobook

The first thing Lale Sokolov does that made me set my coffee down is refuse to look away. Consider this your spoiler-free guide to the Tattooist of Auschwitz audiobook. He’s the prisoner handed the job of tattooing identification numbers onto…

Pachinko Audiobook

“History has failed us, but no matter.” Eight words start this novel, and a week after finishing the audiobook I am still carrying them around like a stone in my coat pocket. A few spoiler-free thoughts on the Pachinko audiobook,…

The Book Thief Audiobook

The first voice you meet here doesn’t belong to a girl, or to a soldier, or to anyone alive. Consider this your spoiler-free guide to the Book Thief audiobook. It belongs to Death, and in this Listening Library edition Death…

The Nightingale Audiobook

Somewhere around the part where Vianne is standing in her orchard, doing the impossible math of stretching a winter of nothing into meals for a child, I noticed my own tea had gone stone cold on the counter. This is…