- Read by: Rajesh self-narrates with confident timing and warmth; the voice you hear is the voice that wrote the book, and it shows throughout.
- At its heart: Railway travel as human encounter, political geography observed from the train, companionship and minor friction in motion
- Vibe: Warm, observant, and episodic; the pleasure of good company across a long journey through unfamiliar places
- Short version: One of the finest contemporary travel audiobooks in the rail tradition; award-winning, self-narrated, and genuinely pleasurable across eleven hours.
Monisha Rajesh narrating her own audiobook about train travel is an arrangement that feels almost inevitable once you hear it. Around the World in 80 Trains, winner of the National Geographic Traveller Award for Best Travel Book, is an account of a journey covering tens of thousands of kilometers across more than thirty countries, from London's St Pancras station through Russia, Mongolia, North Korea, Kazakhstan, Canada, and back again. The decision to write and read the same text means what you hear is not a performance of Rajesh's voice but the voice itself, with all its humor and occasional exasperation intact. I listened to long stretches of this during a period when I had no prospect of going anywhere particularly far, and the effect was precisely what you want from a travel audiobook in those circumstances: a persistent sense of forward movement through genuinely unfamiliar geography, with company that does not perform enthusiasm but appears to feel it.
The Verne reference in the title is deliberate and earned. Rajesh packs her rucksack, packs her fiance Jem, and the two of them proceed to accumulate a remarkable series of encounters with the full range of human personality that long-distance rail travel tends to produce. From silk-sheeted luxury on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express to the political strangeness of North Korea, the journey moves across registers that would be difficult to believe if they were not so specifically documented.
The Verdict, Briefly
One reviewer described the book as 'culturally interactive and observational,' a phrase that captures something real about Rajesh's method. She is not primarily interested in scenery. She is interested in the people she encounters and the political and social conditions that shape those encounters. The North Korean chapters carry a precision about the managed nature of what tourists are permitted to experience that lifts them above the usual traveler-in-the-strange-land register. You understand not just that you are seeing a curated version of North Korea, but what the curation is designed to accomplish and what it reveals despite itself.
The book also handles the question of traveling as a couple with more honesty than the genre usually manages. Jem is present as a real person with his own responses to the journey, and the relationship between them is not sentimentalized into a travel-brochure image. The minor tensions and negotiations of long-distance travel together are part of the text, and they make the book feel more true than it would if Rajesh had treated Jem as simply a warm prop in her adventure.
The self-narration is one of the audiobook's strongest assets. Rajesh's comedic timing in the anecdotal passages is confident, and her voice carries a warmth that would be difficult to replicate with a professional narrator unfamiliar with the material. The travel-writing form depends on the presence of a particular consciousness organizing the experience, and in this audiobook you hear that consciousness directly. Michael Palin, in his endorsement, described the journey as 'getting to the heart of things,' which is the right description of both the text and the narration.
At eleven hours and four minutes, the runtime is long enough to feel genuinely immersive without becoming burdensome. The chapter structure maps loosely to individual trains and countries, which means natural stopping points exist throughout, and the audiobook works well for episodic listening over several days as well as extended sessions. It is a book that rewards returning to, particularly if you have been away from it long enough to have forgotten the specific details of the previous chapter.
Things to Know Before Starting Around the World in 80 Trains
A reviewer compared this book to Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar, and the comparison is informative. Both are literary train travel books with strong personal voices and a genuine interest in people over landscapes. But Rajesh and Theroux are writing from different positions and in different eras. Rajesh is younger, more explicitly collaborative in her journey, more openly affectionate toward the people she meets, and less interested in the slightly melancholic detachment that Theroux cultivates as a mode. Listeners who know the Theroux will find Rajesh a welcome contrast; listeners coming fresh to the train travel genre can begin with either and find the other a natural companion.
The book captures a specific political moment in the countries it visits. The North Korea material in particular exists as a snapshot of a period when limited tourism was permitted, and the conditions of access have shifted since the journey was made. This does not diminish the book but it is worth knowing that some of the political context has evolved, which is the inevitable condition of any travel book that engages seriously with the places it describes.
Best Suited For
This audiobook is for listeners who love travel writing in the literary tradition, who are drawn to train travel as a subject, or who want company during their own long journeys. It works particularly well for listeners who prioritize the human encounter over landscape description, as Rajesh is much more interested in the people she meets than in the geography she passes through. The self-narration is an asset, the humor is reliable, and the range of destinations is genuinely remarkable. The National Geographic Traveller Award is not a routine endorsement and reflects the quality of what Rajesh and her publisher delivered.
