The Lincoln Highway Audiobook

Edward Herrmann’s narration is all warmth and gravel, the kind of voice that makes you trust every word. A few spoiler-free thoughts on the Lincoln Highway audiobook, then. That’s exactly the gift The Lincoln Highway needs on audio, where Amor Towles’s ten-day, cross-country tale unspools event by event. I kept finding excuses to press on to the next chapter.

A road story that spends most of its energy refusing to go anywhere in a straight line

Amor Towles sets this one in June 1954, over just ten days, and he counts the chapters down from Ten to One so you can feel the exit approaching whether you are ready or not. Emmett has come home to Nebraska from a work farm to find his father dead, the family land foreclosed, and his eight-year-old brother Billy holding a postcard theory about where their mother went. The plan is simple. The plan lasts about a chapter. Two boys named Duchess and Woolly, who followed Emmett out of the farm by hiding in the trunk of the warden’s car, have plans of their own, and those plans point the opposite way down the country’s first transcontinental highway.

What I loved is how little this resembles a thriller even though the mechanics of one are ticking underneath. Towles keeps stopping to let a character deliver a whole life story, or recite a favorite passage, or make a small moral accounting of a debt owed. If you came up loving the unhurried grandeur of A Gentleman in Moscow, you will recognize the hand at work here, though this book is scruffier, funnier, and far more willing to break your heart in a gas-station parking lot.

Edoardo Ballerini carries most of the road, and I never once lost track of who was talking

This is a full-cast production, and it is the best argument I have heard in a while for listening rather than reading. Edoardo Ballerini narrates the lion’s share of the perspectives, and the man is a magician with register. His Duchess is all showman’s warmth papered over something you cannot quite trust; his Emmett is careful, decent, wound tight; his Billy is earnest without ever tipping into the cutesy child-voice that ruins so many audiobooks. When the point of view shifts, and it shifts often, Marin Ireland and Dion Graham step in to voice two of the story’s most important figures, and the handoffs feel like a relay rather than a patchwork. Nobody is doing an impression of anybody. Each reader simply owns their stretch of the highway.

The runtime is 16 hours and 39 minutes, which sounds like a commitment until you are in it, at which point it starts to feel like the drive is too short. I listened to a long stretch of it while repainting a fence, and I genuinely resented the fence for ending before the chapter did.

Lessons in Chemistry is the audiobook I kept mentally shelving this one beside, not for the plot but for the era and the ear, both of them 1950s Americana told by a cast that treats period detail as music rather than furniture.

Duchess is the character who kept making me miss my own highway exits

I will stay spoiler-free, but I have to talk about Duchess, because he is the reason this book lodged under my ribs. He is a former vaudeville kid with a ledger in his head, forever balancing favors and slights, and Towles lets him narrate long enough that you start to root for a version of events that a wiser part of you knows is doomed. Ballerini plays him with this hopeful, hustling brightness that makes the wince, when it comes, land harder. Woolly, gentle and adrift and quoting the things he half-remembers, is his perfect counterweight. The two of them together are the funniest and saddest thing in a book that is very good at being both at the same moment.

And Billy, my goodness. Billy carries a red Army-surplus book of heroes and reads from it like scripture, and his faith that stories have shapes, that journeys resolve, is the tender nerve the whole novel keeps pressing on. Fans of the resilient, road-worn Americana in The Four Winds will feel right at home with the dust and the longing here, even as Towles points his characters toward a very different horizon.

Who I would actually hand this audiobook to

If you like your fiction propulsive but literary, if you have a long drive or a long fence ahead of you, and if you do not mind a book that occasionally wanders off to tell you a fable before returning to the plot, this is an easy recommendation. If you need every chapter to advance the mystery, the detours may test you. Me, I would take the detours every time. The ending divided a lot of readers, and I understand why, but I found it earned and quietly devastating, the kind of last chapter you sit with in a parked car.

The book details are below if you want the narrator, runtime, and format at a glance before you commit your next dozen listening hours.

This is one of the rare doorstop novels I finished wishing it were longer, and a large part of that credit belongs to the cast. A lesser production would have flattened these voices into one; this one lets each character keep their own weather.

Three things I would love to hear back from you

• Did the eastward turn frustrate you the way it thrilled me, or did you spend the whole book quietly urging Emmett to just point the car back toward California?
• Which narrator won you over first, and did the perspective changes deepen the story for you or pull you out of it?
• When you reached the final chapter, did you land on devastated, satisfied, or a little cheated, and has your feeling shifted in the days since?