Two new audiobooks from Heide and Iain.

Published: Thu, 08/24/23

Heide: Hello, friend. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve had two new audiobooks come out in the past month.

Iain: That’s right. Two new audiobooks, each narrated by a different voice artist, although we’ve worked with both of them before.

Heide: First up, Di Croft has recorded the novel, Disenchanted. Now, to us, it feels like we wrote this a long, long time ago.

Iain: Time does fly by. The book Disenchanted came out in 2017, I believe. We wanted to write a sort of modern fairy tale about a woman who doesn’t want to comply with the ‘Happily ever after’ that her fairy godmother has got lined up for her.

Heide: Exactly. In the story, Ella has her own business and her own life and, despite the annoyance caused to her by her dad’s future remarriage, she’s doing things her own way.

Iain: Then along come seven foul-mouthed dwarfs who figuratively (and then literally) try to drag her off to her fairy tale princess wedding.

Heide: Actually, in terms of the language, it’s one of the rudest books we’ve ever written, not least because it features a magic carpet powered by expletives.

Iain: There are some very funny characters in there and narrator, Di, said that it’s got one of the most diverse sets of characters she's ever had to voice for us. Her vocal work on the dwarfs and the evil Mr Dainty are just hilarious all by themselves.

Heide: You particularly like listening to audiobooks.

Iain: I do. It really fits in with my routine. Whether I’m off for a walk or driving somewhere, it’s great to have an audiobook to listen to. And what I really, really like about the narrators we’ve worked with is that they truly embody the characters. They effectively turn the book into a one-person dramatic radio play. Both Di Croft and the other narrator we often work with, Matthew Lloyd Davies, really work on the character voices and deliver a believable performance.

Heide: We recently worked with Matthew on the latest Clovenhoof book, Alpacalypse.

Iain: That’s right. In fact, he was partway through working on the latest Sam Applewhite audiobook but just jumped at the chance to get back into the Clovenhoof role. He really relishes doing those stories.

Heide: I think there’s something about the Clovenhoof books that is very comforting – despite the naughtiness and demonic behaviour. Spending time with ‘Satan in suburbia’ Jeremy Clovenhoof is like spending time with a friend.

Iain: There’s a lot of familiar fun in Alpacalypse, even when the end of the world is looming and Clovenhoof’s flatmate Nerys is trying crazier and crazier things to avert Armageddon.

Heide: Now, quite a few people have asked us why we’ve not recorded audiobooks of Trump of Doom, Clovenhoof’s Diary and the Isolation Chronicles. They’re mostly a diary-style set of stories that take place against real world events (the Trump election, Brexit and the Covid pandemic). But narratively, they fit somewhere between book 5 (Beelzebelle) and book 7 (Alpacalypse) —

Iain: — and there’s events in them that are referenced in later books, such as Michael going prison for trespassing at the Large Hadron Collider and Clovenhoof and Nerys getting married, for very unromantic reasons.

Heide: We’d love to see them become audiobooks – maybe even a single huge bumper-sized audiobook — but it’s not been part of our plans yet.

Iain: Meanwhile, Matthew Lloyd Davies is working on finishing that audiobook of Sam Applewhite book 6 (Jaegermax) and we should hopefully see that out sometime in the next few months.

Heide: Maybe one day our narrators will have caught up with us and recorded all the novels we’ve written.

Iain: We might need to slow down then. Just to give them a chance.

And just in case you did want to know, this is a list of our books (most of them). The ones marked with an asterisk have not yet been recorded as an audiobook.

The Clovenhoof Books

Clovenhoof

Pigeonwings

Godsquad

Hellzapoppin’

Beelzebelle

Clovenhoof and the Trump of Doom*

Hooflandia

Holymoly

The Clovenhoof Diaries*

The Isolation Chronicles*

Alpacalypse