Toby Fleishman is a newly divorced doctor and father of two alone and adrift in New York after 14 years of marriage. A bundle of anxiety and neuroses, he wakes up every morning in a place that isn’t the family home and thinks: “Something is wrong. There is trouble. I am in trouble.” He is overwhelmed by the possibilities of online dating, where, for the first time in his life, women can’t get enough of him and deluge him with semi-naked selfies: “All this new opportunity! There weren’t enough hours in the day!” But his problems really begin when his ex-wife, Rachel, drops their children off in the dead of night to go on a yoga retreat and then disappears seemingly without trace.
The New York Times Magazine writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s funny, acerbic and precisely plotted debut novel – a TV adaptation of which arrives this month starring Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes – is read here by the voice actor Allyson Ryan, who makes the most of the author’s sharp dialogue and sardonic wit. Fleishman’s story is told through the eyes of his old college friend Libby, formerly a magazine profile writer and now a stay-at-home mother, who recalls him saying that his wife, a successful talent agent, “was just angry all the time”. But if the early chapters present Fleishman as put-upon and overshadowed by the icily ambitious, social-climbing, money-obsessed Rachel, a more complex picture of the former couple emerges later on, building to a climax that requires the listener to re-evaluate all they think they knew.
• Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner is available from Wildfire, 14hr 34min.
Further listening
Love, Pamela
Pamela Anderson, Headline, 5hr 28min
The former Playboy model and Baywatch star reads her memoir in which she reckons with her history and her treatment by the media, and embraces her new life as a single fiftysomething mother of two.
The Hollow Crown
Dan Jones, Audible Studios, 13hr 32min
The British historian and author of Powers and Thrones narrates this detailed and authoritative account of the Wars of the Roses and the rise of the Tudors.
