Quick Take
- Narration: Andrew Eiden’s 2026 Audie Award finalist performance is fully earned, he finds Denny’s specific combination of earnestness and limited self-awareness without parody, making the character’s dignity feel real throughout.
- Themes: Disability and self-determination, family love and its limits, the comedy and cost of trying to do the right thing
- Mood: Poignant and warm, with a comedy of errors surface over genuine emotional depth
- Verdict: The Giller Prize longlisting is deserved, Holly Kennedy has written a novel that makes a character defined by limitation feel expansive, and Eiden’s narration makes it one of the year’s finest listening experiences.
I started The Sideways Life of Denny Voss on a Tuesday evening after reading the Giller Prize longlisting and not recognizing the title. By Wednesday night I had finished it, which is not how I usually operate with a nine-hour book on a work week. There is something about Denny Voss, the specificity of him, the way Holly Kennedy writes his interiority without condescension or sentimentality, the accumulation of small chaos that constitutes his year, that makes the listening experience feel unusually present. I was not listening at arm’s length the way I sometimes do with critically celebrated novels. I was just in Denny’s world.
The premise involves a murder charge. Thirty-year-old Denny Voss, who has a developmental delay and lives with his elderly mother and his beloved blind-and-deaf Saint Bernard named George, has somehow ended up accused of killing a mayoral candidate after crashing a sled full of guns into a tree. As Denny awaits trial, his court-appointed therapist walks him through the events of the past year, events that also include kidnapping a neighbor’s cantankerous goose for excellent reasons and accidentally assisting in a bank robbery. The comedy is real. So is the pain underneath it.
What Denny Knows That Other Narrators Don’t
Denny Voss is not an unreliable narrator in the conventional literary sense, he does not lie, and he does not misread his own motivations. He is, rather, a narrator whose information is genuinely incomplete. He knows what happened; he does not always know what it meant, or what other people were doing around the edges of his perception. This creates a very specific kind of dramatic irony: the reader understands things Denny does not, but the experience of watching him piece together what was actually happening is never manipulative. Kennedy trusts him completely, and that trust communicates itself to the listener.
Andrew Eiden’s narration is the mechanism by which this trust is established. His performance earned a 2026 Audie Award finalist nomination, and the specificity of what he does with Denny is worth examining. Denny’s speech has a particular rhythm, slightly formal, occasionally circling back to clarify things the listener has already understood, and Eiden maintains it without over-insisting on it. The character never sounds like a performance of cognitive difference; he sounds like a person. That distinction is the entire artistic challenge of the narration, and Eiden clears it.
The Goose, the Bank Robbery, and the Murder Charge
Kennedy structures the novel as a series of revelations, Denny’s therapist guides him through the year’s events in a sequence that gradually explains how a well-intentioned man who cleans up roadkill for a living ended up charged with murder. Each incident in the sequence is both funny and painful in precise proportions. The goose kidnapping is purely comic; the bank robbery incident has a darker undertow. By the time the murder charge is fully explained, the novel has built enough context for the stakes to feel genuinely heavy rather than theoretical.
One reviewer noted that they saw the twists coming but found the execution worth reading regardless. That is accurate, the architecture of the revelation is not designed to surprise. It is designed to make the reader care enough about Denny that the moments of clarity, when they arrive, land with appropriate weight. Reviewer 1dawoman wrote that she worried terribly for the touching troubles of Denny, that worry is the novel’s intended effect, and Kennedy earns it without manipulation.
The Family, the Past, and the Truth About Love
The novel’s deeper subject is not the murder charge but the family. Denny has always been surrounded by people who love him, and the investigation into the events around the charge reveals painful truths about the nature of that love, its limits, its blind spots, and its costs to everyone involved including Denny himself. Kennedy navigates this material without villainizing anyone and without resolving the pain into something clean. The people who love Denny have made decisions that were wrong, and those decisions are treated as the product of real human failure rather than narrative convenience.
Eiden’s performance in the later chapters, where the emotional weight accumulates, is where the Audie nomination makes most sense. He manages Denny’s processing of difficult information, information about his past that changes how he understands his present, with exactly the patience and confusion that the character requires. The final act does not rush the resolution, and Eiden does not push it.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen if literary fiction with a warmly observed protagonist and a carefully built emotional architecture sounds right. The Giller Prize longlisting tells you something about the novel’s ambitions, and those ambitions are fulfilled. This is also an extraordinary argument for the audiobook format specifically, Denny Voss is a character who comes alive through voice in a way that print might not fully replicate.
Skip if you need a tight mystery plot with surprising revelations, the structure is not designed for thriller tension, and readers expecting conventional mystery plotting will find the pace too contemplative. Also skip if representations of developmental disability are something you need to approach with caution; Kennedy’s treatment is respectful and generous, but the subject is central and unavoidable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Andrew Eiden was an Audie Award finalist for this performance, what specifically makes his narration of Denny so effective?
Eiden maintains Denny’s specific speech rhythm, slightly formal, occasionally repetitive in the way of someone carefully reconstructing events, without ever reducing it to a performance of cognitive difference. The character’s dignity is preserved throughout, and the narration makes the gap between what Denny knows and what the reader understands feel genuinely moving rather than condescending.
The book is longlisted for the Giller Prize, does it read as literary fiction or more as accessible commercial fiction?
It occupies a genuine middle ground. The Giller longlisting reflects its literary qualities, the careful interiority, the structural sophistication of the therapist-guided revelation, the thematic depth around disability, family love, and self-determination. But it reads with the warmth and accessibility of commercial fiction. Listeners who do not usually seek out literary prizes will likely find it more approachable than that context suggests.
How does the therapist-guided narrative structure work in audio? Does it create distance from Denny’s voice?
The therapist functions as a framing device, she asks questions, Denny reconstructs events, but the vast majority of the listening experience is Denny’s voice rather than dialogue with the therapist. The structure does not create distance; it creates the context that makes Denny’s narration feel like testimony rather than confession, which serves the emotional architecture.
Is the novel funny throughout, or does the comedy fade as the serious elements accumulate?
The comedy is present throughout, though its register shifts. Early incidents like the goose kidnapping are fully comic. The bank robbery has more mixed tones. The later chapters, which deal with the murder charge and the family secrets, are predominantly emotional rather than comic, but Kennedy never fully abandons the warmth that makes Denny’s voice distinct. The book earns its emotional weight by building it gradually rather than switching modes abruptly.
